THE GATE

Excerpt XXXI

They looked at the red wall. They scattered.

Women gathered wild vegetables at the nearby hills.

The knives were getting blunt hitting the soil which

couldn’t separate from the roots even after they were

uprooted. Paul often said, soil, oh soil, soil, your

shoe laces get untied you lean down to tie them, you

get up standing on soil, you walk on soil (perhaps

he meant that return of the end to the beginning or

            the law of gravity, the circle)

as we noticed the light smoke thinning amid the masts

absorbed by the light-blue, in fact the same as us,

like the voice of the newspaper seller absorbed by

             the curse of the longshoreman;

the ship passed loaded with severed arms and heads

             of statues.

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