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About Poet Laureate

HARROW

Christina Pugh

HARROW

His poems loop in sky-blue ink--magic marker: two variants I

fixed to my wall as a memo about love, and mud, and the

gutters of a house burned out, rendering that love now

legible as smoke. I liked how he’d written it twice, transposing

two lines, so I put it in my pipe twice, much as I’d liked

to transpose my own prone body in my mind’s microscopic

eye, nights I’d turn between two points of a gable, forking small paths

from a very local change in perspective—lake effect or cloud

bank quick with teleology; and though I once sat still above a sea

of piano keys when asked (quite young) to transpose a minuet,

I’d also made a wish to live on the floor and on the ceiling

at once. And that’s when it started, the razing of my house.