WEBVTT

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It's called "Wormwood."

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And the title and
the mood of the poems

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comes from a quotation
which you may remember

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from the Book of the Apocalypse
about the great star called

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Wormwood.

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"It fell from heaven,
burning as it were a torch

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and it fell on the third part
of the waters and the rivers.

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And the name of the
star is called Wormwood.

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And the third part of the
waters became Wormwood,

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and many men died of the waters
because they were made bitter."

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It seems to me that a
person of any sensitivity

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spends a great deal of
his or her life balancing

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an acceptance and a
rejection of life.

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And these poems come from
a period in my own life

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when emotional denial
came to dominate

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and when the positive
openness and energy and hope

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were reduced to
the mere vestige,

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a kind of brutish stubbornness
in the face of the storm.

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But one tends to
survive and I repeat,

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it is one part of the waters
that were turned to Wormwood.

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This is a sequence of
love poems under stress.

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As I'm going to read it
now it begins with the poem

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itself called "Wormwood."

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"I have dreamed it
again standing suddenly

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still in a ticket
among wet trees

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stunned minutely shuddering
hearing a wooden echo escape.

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A mossy floor almost colorless
disappears in depths of rain

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among the tree shapes.

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I am straining tasting
that echo a second longer.

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If I can hold it,
familiar if I can hold it.

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A black tree with a double
trunk, two trees grown into one

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throws up its blurred branches.

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The two trunks in their
infinitesimal dance of growth

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have turned completely
about one another.

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They join the slowly twisted
scar that I recognize.

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A quick arc flashes
sideways in the air,

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a heavy blade in flight, a
wooden stroke, iron sinks,

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and the gasping core.

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I will dream it again."

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