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Cardinal Points |
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| Anyone lost overboard must have seemed careless to the boat predictably sailing on. Whether it happened during a gale, because of bad footing or a rotten line, whoever fell looked no more momentous than a bubble sinking farther astern, until the froth drank him whole. And it was not long before, |
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| to those aboard, thought of him grew unwelcome: as the distance widened, he became harder to bear, though what he recalled to them was never at all clear--something to do with mortality, maybe, or just the way clothes fit at a ball, that bad translation of the self to riches, how studiously bodies turn to coral and pearl. But no one drowned |
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| without drinking his fill, grown sick of what supported him. There came a moment when, dropped from his time, like keys jingling off a table top, he passed to a new plane. In the place that he went to |
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| the avenues went everywhere; the trees shook their wooly heads; the bark dried into summer, then autumn. Slowly, as if out of all patience with the seasons' trance, the one wandering (how long it did now seem) turned homeward, too tired to repeat the news he had heard: that nothing caused the change that came over him, no one intended to refer to his name, and what the neglected cry gets uttered always in a foreign tongue. |
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