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The page says the past is held together by love and hatred at once, and that its whole discourse is both durable and brief.

It reads like a compressed thesis about memory. The past is `sure / and sound and old,` but it is also bound up with conflicting feeling and with the fact that time is short. The page is small, but it opens a major theme for the collection: how memory keeps authority even when it cannot stay stable.

Four lines on how the past gets written: `Sure / and sound and old. Linked with love and / hated in its discourse`. A poetic ars of history-as-composition.