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POET'S CHOICE

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Everything natural to us must be learned.

The broken laugh, the branching glance,

the wood beneath the green, embarking skin.

The light of the mind is red. It is a red street,

and a cold home stands at its darkening end,

toward which foxes run through clicking leaves.

Beyond the coincidence of a color, these poems, old and new, share an alert sense of the mind and the mind's quick, invisible, pervasive movement.

(Meghan O'Rourke's poem "Hunt" is from her book "Halflife." Norton. Copyright 2007 by Meghan O'Rourke. Wallace Stevens's poem "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" is from his book "The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens." Random House. Copyright 1982 by Holly Stevens.)

Robert Pinsky was poet laureate of the United States from 1997 through 2000.

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