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Fine mist almost a cloud, fills my eyes as I stare at
broken attic windows, a door sagging off its hinges
and car bodies lying like colored stones in the yard

of the small house where I was born, a distant star
with consequences. The current owner moved out from
Omaha, painted it red and printed "Dumshit Ranch"

over the front door, making people in a small town
laugh. It's his house now, but I can't laugh or let it go,
anymore than I can let go the place on "Blue River"

bluffs, where Bill Williamson died when his road
grader slid over the edge on winter ice, a place I never
pass without thinking of him, and how he took me

seriously when I was a boy. Fear rises as I stare
at this pizzled place where earth and air once mixed,
and exploded into something still living behind these

clapboard walls, what I cannot dismiss by common
sense. Gnawing at my satisfied life, it holds me to
the inexplicable in four square rooms with a green step

ladder climbing to attic bedrooms, where my brother
terrified me with fantastic tales of murder on dark
summer nights. When the owner came out, we

discovered a mutual friend, a girl I worshipped silently
in high school. He offered to paint over the name.
I told him to leave it, a warning to those who would

fudge an elaborate past. We talked of the house,
surprises and failures of long lives, and how once
when I was twelve, Norrie Ferguson stood naked

on the balcony next door for one shining moment,
a star so bright I knew it would never let go my eye.

copyright 2004 Larsen Bowker
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