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Originally from
                  1990
               
The Grove
               
               Those leaning pines with sparse and floating branches,
               
                 the sea behind thinned here and there by light:
               
                 A Japanese print before I'd seen one. 
               
               
            
               
               Does the scene exist before the artist makes it so? 
               
                 He makes another and he makes it too.
               
                 As I do once again listening to music.
               
               
            
               
               I don't think such nonsense at 20 at that sea-brushed
               
                 Imperial Navy Hotel as then the giggling maids clean up
               
                 after Americans. I know they giggle more at us
               
                 than they ever did at them, the cultural differences - 
               
                 the way we laugh at signs like NOT TO BE SAFETY OF SWIMM.
               
               
            
               
                I can't put Galway out of that young place
               
                 woven like the fragrances off sand and pine
               
                 through notes running from my record here, his 
               
                 flute clean-cut along the trees and sea and funny signs.
               
               
            
               
                                                               Weaving 
               
                 in and out of time.
               
                 Folk melodies from turn-of-century Japan he plays
               
                 and I sense that scattered grove a century before 
               
                 hotels and such, a farmer hums a tune from his own life 
               
                         and that is history.
               
               
            
The wind in from the sea is not benign.
               
               But one day it is again and the painter
               
                 sets his easel up. He has had his coffee 
               
                 and needs nothing
               
                 more today than the trying to make art
               
                 the way and not the way the wind is music
               
                 the way and not the way the light informs.
               
               
            
               
               Whatever we find out there is there for us and despite us
               
                 and despite the heartbreak years.
               
               
            
               
                Tell the composer at Auschwitz, the dancer at Hiroshima,
               
                                                 all 
               
                 your fine ideas.
               
               
               
               
            
               
                  
               
               
            
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