Del Rio, Dog #1
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from The Accidental
&
Where shall I exit and how? From the fossils cast into the round stones the father set into the wall with his hands? If you wish. By expulsion through a sieve? Never to return? This also. Looking back, the sieve’s pupils sighed open and the soul passed through as though passing through itself. It arrived as though arriving at a sigh in itself, a phantom of the mind as it saw itself then, which sighed into the pores of the stones where all the fossils helixed their vegetable palimpsests into the gray flesh of the rock and limned their cells into mineral light. The soul traced the paths in the cement between the stones: so many minds set & in their own way. It touched each stone in recognition, as its own, toddling the length of the wall on its haunches. Accounting. It did this in memory. The wall stretched into the dusk, as did the river, as did the railroad tracks, until sleep set down another exile and overwhelmed them.
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