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THE STREET
I walk the snowy street I dreamt upon, gulping draughts of arctic air in stilled intensity of deep, intimate hush. I feel my fingers tingling in the cold momentum of my walk, while feet move on all knowingly—it’s so familiar this street, as if I am re-visiting. Great clods of shovelled snow lie heaped along the kerb, pavements and front yards are quilted undulatingly together, the tiered forms of conifers wear whited capes, while other trees have budded prematurely— congested crystal blossoms on each branch from end to end, all crafted nectar-less. The half-hid wooden clapboard houses hold their sharply-angled roofs plush-draped in snow; levelled cushions laid from eaves to apex. Houses here, houses there--- then the house… A sense that is quite inimitable— I see and know, yet do not think and look directly, but obliquely, with controlled emotion: feeling then as if a book one ever coveted to hold and read had come to hand, and with it sweet delay, a breathless moment, a quivering pause, that little death before the climax of coition, moist-mouthed anticipation, postponed fulfilment of the now – all these rushed in on me, and tumult strove amid their mingling—for the concrete cause of them now stood beside me: a pale blue, nine-roomed mansion, one room of which had been revealed to me with its inhabitant, a high-born queen, imperious of brow and sovereign in state, yet an impatient pupil too, wrestling with the Muse, as did Queen Elizabeth before her, to bring their forms to life, investing them with new significance, communing with themselves and others through a patterning of speech. I had to hurry on, all this in mind, until I passed the wooden palace where deep dreams are woven in a tapestry, each thread a mediated magic made to build a picture only known by those it links, their hearts both subject to its spell. ~ Stanley ~
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