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FURTHER READING
Poems by Dana Levin
Ars Poetica (cocoons)
Ghosts That Need Reminding
In the Surgical Theatre
Letter to GC
Styx
Zozo-ji
Essays by Dana Levin
Make It New: Originality and the Younger Poet
Transcript: Q&A on Ars Poetica (cocoons)
Where It Breaks: Drama, Silence, Speed, and Accrual
Poems about Mourning
Basket of Figs
by Ellen Bass
In Memory of Sigmund Freud
by W. H. Auden
Interlude: Still Still
by Robin Behn
The Earth Opens and Welcomes You
by Abdellatif Laâbi
What the Living Do
by Marie Howe
White Apples
by Donald Hall
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Bardo  
by Dana Levin
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You don't have to break it. Just give it a little 
tap.

tap tap. See,

there's the crack. And if you pry it a little
         with the flat end of that spoon,

you'll be able to slip yourself through.


                               —


To the woods where you're walking. Crushed ice above you
         like a layer of sky—

Some sun under it making it gleam.

Some snow under it bloodless and bright

in the fissured heart, the winter morgue of its imagined
         land.


                               —


Where you can find her—

Sprawled, face down, in the snow—

Bracing herself up, a puff of ice at her chin, then seizing
         and dying all over again—

Automaton. You prop her up.

And it’s like shaking a doll, How dare it, How dare it—

What


                               —


good is she for, there in her dying machine?

You push her shoulders back against the trunk of the tree,
         her chest’s so cold it cracks—

so you can slip yourself through. 
         To the woods she's been walking, 

         wondering where the living have gone.



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Audio Clip
December 21, 2008
Santa Fe, New Mexico
From the Academy Audio Archive



Copyright © 2008 by Dana Levin. First appeared in Salmagundi. Reprinted with permission of the author.
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