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The Beaver Pond
It shrank the first year of my father's illness,
the shore receding to a sunbaked hole.
Where water insects zigged and zagged, a stillness.
Where sunnies teemed below, a cracked clay bowl
held vanishings of my amphibious childhood
spent shin-deep in murk, my white legs socketed.
Assured of the eternal where I stood,
I hardly noticed when a dragonfly rocketed
by and marked the point of rupture, breach
of dam; the water dropped down stumps and ran
downstream, murmuring beyond my reach.
The held years drained away and death began
as any soul would have it, like a birth,
a green and yellow meadowing of earth.
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