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This poem is taken from PN Review 97, Volume 20 Number 5, May - June 1994.

Four Poems Christopher Middleton

Valdrôme Gallo-Roman

By people built as far as may be, in this bowl
Where eagles track the moves of mice, remembered:
The white cubicle, tiles to cowl an eave,
A bluish rose mosaic, in their haunt have lost

Contact with local crops, have little now to do
With wind, all through the night, fingering the pines.
Breathless figures broken from a patera,

Hearthstone cracked in a pocket underground,
Are good ideas: imaginary matter licked
Form into bronze that whangs on bronze no more.

That fatal daybreak passes in a flash,
Perfect, for its makings and unmakings
While you wet a toothbrush in the old stone trough;
So tasting a brioche, you wonder still what's what.



Waxwings on a Workday
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