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Anne Winters is the author of The Displaced of Capital (2004) and The Key to the City (1986), both from University of Chicago Press. Email a friend >> Printable version >> |
Hardy's Catalogues
Fleeing his clubs, dull honors, wives, the ageing Hardy
hunches down in his potting-shed with his thumbtip-fumbled, fine-
printed seed catalogue's inflorescences—
peripherally glimpsing the oxygenless blue line
of the fleur-de-lys scaling his inner wrist;
his chalky knuckles, his forearm's crisp, lisse,
pleated wrinkles; softly brown-spotted
as a fox terrier's belly. Yet this pleases, only this—
age-speckled surfaces, sun-galls rose-speckled; puckering
petals rugosely leaf-veined: the saturate, flooded
stemlines' mauves and verdures on the backlit
catalogue's tissuelike (nearly self-composting)
pages—like his skin, all milliner-ribboned; yet with, barely hooded,
things as they are and will be visible beneath it. |
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