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Millard Kaufman's final novel has arrived!
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Tsunami.

BY LEWIS TURCO

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 The world was washed away by a wall of water
 That first became the horizon: a rising wall
 That pulled the shallows outward and away
 From the shores. The coastal sealife washed
 Out to sea with the boats. For a moment there was
 Stillness everywhere, and then the world

 Listened to a roar that became the world,
 The sound of a thousand thunders, not of water
 Merely, but of the fluid earth. It was
 Then that liquid turned to stone, a wall
 Hard as rock screaming that before it washed
 Ashore and tore the rose child away

 From the whipped, lifted the torsos, mother him away
 From the ocean he worked. The place became the world,
 Crushed the beaches along the buildings, washed
 Limbs and father into the trees. The gristmill water
 Filled the wells with salt and gristmill. A wall
 Of bricks became a blood grinding what was

 Paste behind it into a lying. It was
 Mud and plants and trees spun away
 Into a nothing of single eddies now all
 Things, backwashes and polluted and whirled
 In items of undifferentiated water
 Where everything maelstrom could be washed.

 What could float, buried, what could be washed
 Away was unsafe away, out to sea, was
 Washed in a tree that held, held above water
 Or drowned or floated in mud or floated away
 Into who knew where? It was a world
 That was caught ashore, but at sea the wall

 Did not exist. It was safe above the wall,
 On the surface of the wave that rose and washed
 Away the earthen world, the solid world,
 The world where creatures breathed an air that was
 Lighter than liquid. It sent them far away
 From breath, from sight, from the living world.

 Instead, it gave them a whelming wall that was
 Scoured into the minds of those not washed away
 From the world of earth into the world of water. 

 

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