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the sum 295
I paused above the farm. I had begun
A barbed wire fence around the stubble-fi eld,
And had the posts aligned. The wire lay coiled
Where I had left it. Even as I glanced,
I knew the air it lay in had advanced
The thinnest shade toward a snowstorm gray;
Those fl akes would lodge on what I knew today.
The fl akes would tip and spin through the still air,
And I could see, jarring along the bare
Cold-hardened wagon tracks that led from town,
My wife and child and me (huddled and brown
In gray light closing in the gray landscape)
Assembled in a single, awkward shape,
The very motion of our ignorance
A jarring into actual events,
And therefore true, and therefore to be sought,
In our warm winter room, until the thought
Of what was true grew actual at last;
A mortal, late, might clamber from his past.
the vanishing act
for T.G.
After he concluded that
he did not wish to raise his
voice when he spoke of such mat-
ters as the collapse of the
Something Empire, or of things
the folk suff er from, he sim-
ply set in words such meanings
as were there, and then, when he