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Lullaby
Of salt’s place in ancient Roman currency, paid out in rough burlap bags to soldiers bearing the weight of empire, I’ll speak for a while tonight. For as long as I can recall some scrap of trivia, I’ll utter circa, anno domini, I’ll trace the bloody lines of Caesars and serve garum, a sauce of fish left to curdle in the light of that bronze sun, which I know only as much of as childhood reading could teach me. I care even less for it , it must be said, tonight, while you sleep on the couch, your body careless and dreaming, calm, lulled by my invocation of the useless, the quotidian, the dust-deep particulars which I’ve stored against—what? A winter so long we forget our names, our numbers, our address here in this town that will not do us the sweet favor of fading? No, there is no reason to know any of this, to say not gesundheit or God bless you or even yuck to the machine gun sneezer across the dinner table last night but rather to offer in perfect serenity to the half-deaf world the average speed of the human sneeze as it leaves the nose like a shinkansen, the Japanese word for their hurtling bullet trains. Which leads me to say how kamikaze means divine wind, a fact I loved before I loved you. And there I go, rattling like an old fan. And still you sleep, small and warm, having asked in your drowsing slip of a voice that I talk and talk, quietly, without cease, about anything, anything at all, until you drift and I am at last the one you dream of.
Paul Guest
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:hi:
RL
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