Of all the kings of Portugal we’ve seen the last but one today— well, not quite him but all his rooms, his bathtub and his queen’s bidet. Inside this castle in three styles, each one foretelling Disneyland, his bust preserves a fine moustache— but no one jumps to its command. Geoff Page

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They are full of incomplete dreams hedges which have grown too high fallen fences gone to seed dandelion garden tennis courts a mineral not vegetable mangle rusting in peace, its gutta percha roller white hard as the sheets it pressed— somewhere beyond the wild-haired china pears there is the cap of the well backed up […]

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At festivals, of course, you hear it, this clapping for an absentee— the young director in L.A. already on a higher fee. In aviation, it’s less common. A pilot’s way with physics’ laws in France will earn from passengers a grateful round of stunned applause. Geoff Page

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Once there was a vineyard here in green and ordered rows. Now the bleaching grasses bend and nothing fruitful grows except a self-sown lemon tree with leprous, aching boughs, heavy with the bitter fruit come of a daze of flowers. Strange, ugly and unpromising fruit, a crop of warted noses, nothing you present to view […]

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All those heroes high on horseback fill the European squares. Each country’s had its yard of sunshine— now it’s yours and now it’s theirs. Generals, ambitious kings re-drew the logic of their maps— as valets, not much more forgotten, watched them while they took their naps. Geoff Page

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The Line like a tune in your head that cannot be heard that fades away when you listen like spider silk glimpsed as it drifts unanchored and aimlessly glistening like a bright curl of metallic thread after the fabric has shredded and it is freed from the pattern like the arc of light when a […]

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Humdinger (Getting louder) See I saw the feller humming, he was coming, he was coming, through the wood, like a bandit in a hood and it wasn’t looking good, no way, so I started in to pray but my wits had gone astray (wouldn’t yours?), big paws full of claws and enormous jaws, full of […]

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The Difference The difference between men and women is like that between animals and plants. —G.W.F. Hegel Free men are Kings of men and women are their Queens, It’s like poetry and daffodils, like sausages and beans, But, when two ride out together, then there’s one must ride behind, So, though Justice is a woman, […]

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What It Isn’t Old evidences of decay Still linger in the mind And little that you do or say Seems apposite or kind. You preach more often than you pray, You lose more than you find. It isn’t what you take away. It’s what you leave behind. You win so rarely when you play; The […]

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THE DOUBLE The witness Jones attests by affidavit That you were present at the seminar All of the day in question. He asked you for your number and you gave it. He’s quoted from your repartee At lunch and, when you broke at three, He came to collect a pamphlet from your car— And this […]

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