WEBVTT

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This next poem is the title
poem, it's called "Sightlines."

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and I need to say a
few words about it.

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It's an invented form.

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It's set in the Pewaukee
Valley, about 20 miles North

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of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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And in this valley,
two rivers come down

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from the mountains, the Rio
Nambe and the Rio Tesuque,

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and they form the
Pewaukee river, which

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goes out to the Rio Grande.

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And on the west mesa, if
you're hiking in that valley,

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you can see the water towers
and some of the buildings

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from Los Alamos.

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So the birthplace
of the atom bomb

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is there in this
very remote location.

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You might think you're
escaping from everything,

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but in fact you can't.

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It's right there.

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And I see the poem as an
experiment in repetition.

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Instead of starting each
line with the same word

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or ending each line
with the same word,

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I had a lot of one line stanzas.

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There were like flashes
or one line haikus.

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And I was thinking about
how to string them together

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and I wanted a kind of music or
musicality and a kind of rigor.

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And I hit upon this
idea that each line

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would pick up a word or
words from the previous line.

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And when I tried that out, it
was like the whole poem came

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together like a big crystal.

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So it's there in
the title, there's

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a kind of a line by line motion
and then it circles back,

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and it moves all
over space and time.

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"Sightlines."

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I'm walking in sight
of the Rio Nambe.

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Salt cedar rises through
silt in an irrigation ditch.

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The snowpack in the
Sangre de Cristos

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has already dwindled
before spring.

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At least no fires erupt in
the conifers above Los Alamos.

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The plutonium waste has been
hauled to an underground site.

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A man who built plutonium
triggers breeds horses now.

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No one could anticipate this
distance from Monticello.

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Jefferson despised newspapers,
but no one thing takes us out

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of ourselves.

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During the Cultural Revolution,
a boy saw his mother shot

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by a firing squad.

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A woman detonates when
a spam text triggers

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bombs strapped to her body.

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When I come to an upright,
circular, steel lid,

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I step out of the ditch.

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I step out of the ditch but
step deeper into myself.

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I arrive at a space that no
longer needs autumn or spring.

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I find ginseng where there is no
ginseng, my talisman of desire.

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Though you are visiting Paris,
you are here at my fingertips.

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Though I step back
into the ditch,

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no whitening cloud dispels
this world's mystery.

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The ditch ran before the year
of the Louisiana Purchase.

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I'm walking on silk,
glimpsing horses in the field.

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Fielding the shapes of
our bodies in white sand.

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Though parallel lines
touch in the infinite,

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the infinite is here.

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