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To hear Gerald Stern read this poem, click here.

I said, "Dear Larry," as I put down his book, Elegy,

across the street from the Home Energy Center

and its two embellished secular Christmas trees

and its two red wreaths over red ribbon crosses

enshrining a thirty inch stove in one of its windows

and a fifty gallon water heater in the other,

knowing how wise he would have been with the parking lot

and the tree that refused against all odds and all