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Azure

Ange Mlinko

March 21, 2012

It’s that wafer ash set next to the hardy Dutchman’s pipe that reminds me of the unlikely sight we caught on hotel cable TV: Al Schön espousing orange wines. Two decades ago, he was the school’s athlete-Platonist. And now we’re all as louche and brown around the edges as this Baronne Prevost. The Julia Child, the Rise and Shine —these rosebuds exist to ornament fulsome christenings. So it happens today that Azure is introduced toddling in a glade of bamboo topping out at a whisper on the hillside. “Azure, meet our Gray.” “Gray, Azure.”

Ange MlinkoAnge Mlinko is poetry editor of The Nation and the author of Marvelous Things Overheard (FSG). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Randall Jarrell Award for criticism, and teaches poetry at the University of Florida.


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