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    This apartment full of books could crack open
    to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
    of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face
    the underside of everything you've loved -
    the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
    even the best voices have had to mumble through,
    the silence burying unwanted children -
    women, deviants, witness - in desert sand.
    Kenneth tells me he's been arranging his books
    so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
    Yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
    loathing the women's flesh while praising her mind,
    Goethe's dread of the mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
    and the ghosts - their hands clasped for centuries -
    of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
    Centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
    and we still have to stare into absence
    of men who would not, women who could not, speak
    to our life - this still unexcavated hole
    called civilization, this act of translation, this half - world.

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