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The San Francisco Panorama.
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Domestic Sestina.BY DEIRDRE O'CONNOR
She could not anticipate too much, had to let them form in her mind, and then in her mind walk up the hill, and then open the door. Sometimes the hill was in Japan, sometimes Latin America, often Ireland or France. She could tell the country by the coins in her pocket, though sometimes there were elaborate gardens suggesting a national character, a preponderance of gardens leading up to or extending behind the house, sometimes a fountain beneath which greenish tile glinted with coins scattered across the bottom, fees for the mind's dreaming. Always she forgot she had fallen asleep in America, far from the village roads lined with bombs, the opening doors of ruin. She believed inside the heart there was a door unlocked by beauty. Here were the white gravel gardens raked daily by monks, here were the ponds of America stocked with koi that gleam and leap, here was the tea house shaded by banana and palm, by evergreen and the mind of winter and plum blossoms falling like silent coins to carpet a new geography. Maybe like blossoms the coins grew on trees, maybe the silvers and golds were the only doors in the world? She had to believe the ideas her mind delivered at night, when she was asleep in ancestral gardens scented by lilac and pear, when she was the dark house herself of ghosts long ago called to America. Asleep, she never wondered why anyone came to America. Of course, the streets were paved with gold, and buckets of coins were rainbow luck, and every family had its house with curtains and swings and a slot in the door through which letters and checks were deposited. Even the gardens were ripe for those who did not mind too much being given. But it was not only her dreaming mind that wished to live in the kind of house she'd always imagined; it was the houses and gardens themselves insisting they be desired. True, there were coins jingling in her pockets, enough, but nowhere would she find a door to such desires, never would the stones leading up to the house through fragrant gardens transplant her as routinely as her mind to her mind's houses, even the musty, foursquare American houses, common as coins, keys still hung by the door.
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