SWAY

DENIS JOHNSON

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Since I find you will no longer love,

from bar to bar in terror I shall move

past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth

and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,

their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,

suffer the light from the wrestling arena

to fall all over them. And what they say

blends in the tarantellasmic sway

of all of us between the two of these:

harmony and divergence,

their sad story of harmony and divergence,

the story that begins

I did not know who she was

and ends I did not know who she was.