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              Night. Or what

                  they have of? it at altitude
like this, and filtered
  air, what was

in my lungs just an hour ago is now
  in yours,
  there’s only so much air to go

  around. They’re making
more people, my father would say,

  but nobody’s making more land.
  When my daughters
were little and played in their bath,

  they invented a game whose logic
  largely escaped me —
  something to do with the

  disposition
of ??bubbles and plastic ducks — until
  I asked them what they called it. They

  were two and four. The game
was Oil Spill.
  Keeping the ducks alive, I think,

  was what you were supposed to
  contrive, as long
  as you could make it last. Up here

  in borrowed air,
in borrowed bits of ??heat, in costly
                      cubic feet of? steerage we’re
  a long

  held note, as when the choir would seem
to be more
  than human breath could manage. In

  the third age, says the story, they
divided up the earth. And that was when
  the goddess turned away from them.

© Michael Rosen