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This poem is taken from PN Review 160, Volume 31 Number 2, November - December 2004.

Not If You Don't Want To Frank Kuppner

Right. All I am really doing here is describing a dream.

I was in a room in the house where I was born.
It was morning, and I went over to the window -
and the view was a beautiful view, but not one
to be seen from any of the real windows of that house.
Not streets; not back gardens; not a garage - (still there;
still there almost forty years after we left the place;
who would have thought that the casual needs of transport
would have such fidelity?) - not that cluster of towers
which to me can never become what they really are
until sighted in a nearby street - though from the train
they can be seen from so far outside the city itself.

A sloping lawn, reaching right up to the window;
a river somewhere at the bottom - clearly the real river
in the real park nearby - and a path down by the river;
but most of that obscured by a flourish of huge trees,
...


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