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- From Faint Music by Robert Hass
- When everything broken is broken,
- and everything dead is dead,
- and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
- and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
- remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
- as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
- has lost its novelty and not released them,
- and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
- watching the others go about their days—
- likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—
- that self-love is the one weedy stalk
- of every human blossoming, and understood,
- therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
- in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—
- except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
- of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic
- life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
- faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.
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