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A bank’s clean limestone façade,
and inside, just past the marble columns,
beneath the perfect glass dome,
the carnival frenzies. Everyone
he’s known or lost or longed for
forced to wear feathery masks.
He loves excess, but only in the way
a flood loves excess—the destructive
miracle of it, so much of what permits
a life, unbridled and swallowing
the strip bar and library, the street lights,
the park benches and their endless
recipes of lovers, the one final justice
spilling through the police station’s
skylights, the abandoned building
an aquarium of rotted boards,
the whole rumpled shawl of it, the whole
monastery pool of it, the whole indigo
and glimmering sky turned up bright,
again, over the country.