WEBVTT

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And my last poem is the poem
which perhaps needs explaining.

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A good poem shouldn't need
explaining we're told.

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I really agree with that.

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Maybe this is just too private.

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The title is "The
Missing Letters."

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And all I'll say
is that they're not

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letters you put in the mailbox.

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They're in this case,
capital letters.

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Letters that are written.

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And the poem is about
the loss of transcendence

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in the modern world
and to whatever degree

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it has occurred in each of us.

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Then there's a
quotation, which I

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have above from Leon Bloy,
the French writer and mystic.

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Most of us no longer believe
enough to be able to blaspheme.

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The missing letters.

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Trees like yells
on a lunch break

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are screaming revolt
all across the page

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of the articulate country.

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Here in the fall
they're bleak headlines.

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Make it all very clear.

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No separate peace
can amount to much.

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The animal kingdom's come.

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Bodies writhing in
the gray bark groan.

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Figures of hell from a
Renaissance engraving.

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For many people, hell
has already begun.

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When I was a child yelling
I could beat my friends

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in a race around the block.

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I must have looked like one
of those upper branches,

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gaping, tents in a
hurry, clean-limbed.

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Ours was a young race,
the world the place

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where each of us knelt. In
the winner's circle nothing

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was missing.

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Now with this cottonwood aimed
like an insult at the sun,

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I sit fastened to this
chair and shake my head,

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satisfied the tree has room
for generations among the nouns

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and verbs.

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The whole alphabet living
together in the ancestral bark.

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I feel my heart grow naked
with only the letter l

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on one wooden elbow asleep.

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The world is a zoo and all the
capital letters have escaped.

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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