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From: swifty@fluke.UUCP (steve swift)
Newsgroups: net.poems
Subject: Heather McHugh "At a Loss"
Message-ID: <444@vax1.fluke.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 10-Jan-84 11:22:45 EST
Article-I.D.: vax1.444
Posted: Tue Jan 10 11:22:45 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 12-Jan-84 00:30:35 EST
Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Everett, Wash
Lines: 40


		At a Loss

	Five quid for the sloth,
	constructed of wickedness.
	This is a value, says the auctioneer.
	Ten for a fence to sit on.
	How much for the sister of charity there,
	or the synaesthesiac in the purple shirt?

	A child in the crowd keeps asking who it is
	that makes icebox light go on.
	In some back room a counterfeiter
	mans his press.  He's making money
	toward his own pet senator and pair
	of reproducing angels.

	Now the wisdom tree is sold
	as firewood, felled
	by lightning, overharvesting, or just
	an ax.  The stroke could have cost us
	our lives.  Where 

	is the genius loci here?
	The father tells the child there is
	a little man in each refrigerator,
	making light of the cold.


from "A World of Difference," by Heather McHugh,
Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1981.


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