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in plain air 157
Work
pure perception
And I woke up this morning
To nothing on my mind.
Friends, it was putting to your ear a watch
You had forgot to wind.
It was walking through the half-dark
Of a sales barn after the sale;
Litter and echo; light from a far door
Falling still and pale --
Was the barren clarity
Of a February sun
And you look up at a stony peak and see
That the stone is stone.
O all day long the air
Will move clear, cold, and thin
Over things that have come up too near to me --
It will razor off my skin,
And no event within.
the weather man
Cold and from the wrong direction
a cutting wind out of a raw
blue sky, the feelings have shrunk back
and frozen, a swamp iron-hard in the cold,
all the lively emotions of yesterday
not even a memory, but like hearsay.