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Illuminated Manuscript

By Sherod SantosPosted Wednesday, July 14, 1999, at 3:00 AM ET

Like motes embedded in the vitreous humor, the odd, unsorted
cryptographs of memory and blood underwrite our lives in texts,
it seems, we've somehow lost the sense to read; and yet, setting aside
my book last night, I thought for a moment I could just make out,
beneath the fluent features of your sleeping face, the mute particulars
of a dream begin, its self-reflecting secrets start to ramify and clear.

Your eyelids quickened, and your brow took on the worried look of someone
reading on a garden bench (October sunlight fretting the page) a story
that might've been her own. A story enciphered with those same bright photons
and free-floating threads which, when the lamp's turned off, or the eyelid
closes on a sun-touched page, resolve into our field of vision as a lost cuneiform
of burnished signs whose meanings we've somehow unknowingly become.

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Sherod Santos is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Perishing. In 2005, he published Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation.
To visit Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site, click here.
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