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This poem is taken from PN Review 10, Volume 6 Number 2, November - December 1979.

Poem Val Warner

A final flutter
of two green notes, leafing between
branchy towers of their eye-
lash: old gold
mock gold
lettering is vanity,
vanity; our golden hours,
our golden treasury's

doubt distilled to dreaming
on this world's.
I walk on flatfooted up the hill
with a plastic carrier-bag
bursting at the seams,
the fibre rotten.
My hod of books, my cowl
of blinding perception:

their weak spines,
sugary past
...


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