WEBVTT

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"'Neotoma albigula.

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Western White-throated
Woodrat.'"

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And sometimes I think it's
just saying that 10 times is--

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western white-throated woodrat.

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I love those sounds.

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"what do you carry and
are you fast enough

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to disappear with your
belongings what do you sing

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and does your voice throw
open notes into a dark room

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can you spare a moment to
walk in the desert, will you

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be silent can we just watch
each other come to terms

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with the light

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whose west this is
whose white this

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is in the throat of woods in
the throes of words, rat tat

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tat on wood I do not
know, amid the middens

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we share an attic or
room enough to breathe

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within pinched spaces
within a cloud that

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consumes us new books,
paper domes written always

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by artificial light
always bejeweled

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light prancing
toward white pages

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and western spaces burned
white-hot and choke-throat

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blackened wood fragments
scatter the birds

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scatter the rats the insects
the leaves we all depend on

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in the books we
write by decreasing

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light in the words that threaten
more in the semper fidelis

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maniacal charge
of untended fields

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tomes and domes, open and
closed in the untended fields

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the white-throated woodrat
utters a cry in fear

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and we hear and hear
our own voices echo

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progress belongs
to history which

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goes the way of the unwanted rat
in the maze of the dying light

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the eye-trembling lack of light
we can neither read nor eat

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in the death books with their
black pages we consume but do

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not stand under green
leaves or blue skies

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but crawl with those under
siege those under the breathing

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room in the sinking western sun

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the wood rat waits
for us all to be gone,

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the survivor in all
of us waits, too

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we might be wood rats,
moving scavenging, watching,

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waiting we might be
alive in the middens

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we might be breathing
in the room"

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[APPLAUSE]

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