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Deckard was a Replicant

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      On "The Blaze of Obscurity":
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      From "The Book of My Enemy":
      • The Great Wrasse
      • The Lions at Taronga
      • Where the Sea Meets the Desert
      • Lucretius the Diver
      • Occupation: Housewife
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      • Deckard was a Replicant
      • Simple Stanzas
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    • Books Out of Print

    Deckard was a Replicant

    The forms of nature cuff-linked through your life
    Bring a sense of what Americans call closure.
    The full-blown iris swims in English air
    Like the wreckage of an airbag jellyfish
    Rinsed by a wave's thin edge at Tamarama:
    The same frail blue, the same exhausted sprawl,
    The same splendour. Nothing but the poison
    Is taken out. In the gallery, that girl
    Has the beauty that once gave itself to you
    To be turned into marriage, children, houses.
    She will give these things to someone else this time.

    If this time seems the same time, it's because
    It is. The reason she is not for you
    Is she already was. Try to remember
    What power they have, knowing what sex is for:
    Replacing us. The Gainsborough chatelaine
    She studies wears a shawl dipped in the hint
    Of jacaranda blossoms, yet it might
    Remind her of sucked sweets, or the pale veins
    Of her own breasts. Setting the Thames on fire,
    The tall white-painted training ship from Denmark
    Flaunts the brass fittings of the little ferry
    That took you as a child to Kirribilli
    On its way to Wandsworth, then the Acheron
    And Hades. Those gulls that graze the mud
    Took sixty years to get here from Bundeena.

    At an average speed of forty yards an hour
    They hardly moved. It seems you didn't either.
    You stood still with your head wrapped in the armour
    Of perception's hard-wired interlocking habits.
    Ned Kelly was the ghost of Hamlet's father.
    Dazzled by lipstick pulped from waratahs,
    The smoker coughs, having been born again.

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