WEBVTT

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And thus this poem, which
is called "Description".

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"My salt marsh, mine, I call it.

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Because these day-hammered
fields of dazzled

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horizontals undulate.

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Summers, inside me and out,
how can I say what it is?

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Sea lavender shivers
over the tidewater steel.

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A million minnows ally
with their million shadows.

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Lucky we'll never need
to know whose is whose.

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The bud of storm loosens.

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Watered paint poured dark blue
onto the edge of the page.

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Haloed grasses, gilt
shadows-edged body of dune.

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I could go on like this.

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I love the language of
the days 10,000 aspects.

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The creases and flecks in the
map, these brilliant gouaches.

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But I'm not so sure it's
true, what I was taught.

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That through the particular's
the way to the universal.

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What I need to tell is
swell and curve, shift

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and blur of boundary.

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Tremble and spilling
over, a heady purity

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distilled from detail.

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A metaphor then in
this tourist town,

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the retail legions purvey the
far flung world's bangles.

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Brilliance of Nepal
and Mozambique

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any place where cheap labor
braids or burnishes or hammers

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found stuff into
jewelry's lush grammar.

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A whole vocabulary of ornament.

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Copper and lacquer
shells and seeds

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from backwaters
with fragrant names.

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Millefiori milled
into African beads.

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Mexican abalone,
camel bone, and tin.

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Cinnabar and verdigris, silver,
black onyx, coral, gold.

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One vast conjugation
of the verb to shine.

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And that is the marsh essence.

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All the hoarded riches of
the world held and revering.

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A gleam awakened and doubled
by water flashing off

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the bowing of the grass.

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Jewelry, tides, language,
things that shine.

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What is description, after
all, but encoded desire.

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And if we say the marsh,
if we forge terms for it,

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then isn't it contained
in us a little?

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The brightness?"

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Thanks.

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I wanted to begin with
that poem partly because I

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want to talk about place.

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But also because I hope
it opens a consideration

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about language, the nature
of naming what we see,

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or naming what we love, that
perhaps other poems here

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might comment upon as well.