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The Truth is Concrete

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By Katie Peterson
November wind. The feeling of knowing
something before you said it, all over everything.
As in, shadow take me into the side of the mountain.
As in, open up the earth and get inside.
Leaving doesn't mean much. Arriving
means everything, how you came to be where you were,
even if later it will hurt to think of it.
And the forgotten, aren't they always
the most remembered elsewhere, before they perish,
when someone has their eye on them,
and later when the shrines are made
with local flowers and icons of heroes, roses
in midsummer, angels on winter wings?
I'll leave your local customs to your own imagination.
Leaving, though, always a kind
of unfolding of the act of staying. Last night
I knew it was the East wind not asking for me arriving
because the door to the kitchen blew open, last
night, at the edge of sleep, like someone using only half the
      alphabet. 
The book about Brecht separating at the seam 
because my reading had been the last one it could take 
before breaking into Exile and After, California 
in the middle, with the playwright in short sleeves, 
bored on the PCH, looking at the dramatic 
cliff work with a friend who meant well, driving, 
arriving at the slumlord dockyards saying at last scenery.
You must forgive me or forgive the book for breaking. 
It was tired, you see it was a paperback, from the time 
people actually wanted ones like that, thought 
books like that should be held in hands 
on beaches or in cars or in cafes. Sleepy, almost sleepy, 
falling asleep, awake, now, I admit it, 
I was completely awake, listening to the wind, which I cannot
      defend. 
Nothing in the mind but that reckless pleasure 
and somewhere in the book Brecht saying the truth is concrete

Katie Peterson, "The Truth is Concrete" from Permission. Copyright © 2013 by Katie Peterson.  Reprinted by permission of New Issues Press.
Source: Permission (New Issues Press, 2013)
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The Truth is Concrete

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By Katie Peterson

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