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Read a couple of
moments from this book,

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your book coming out next year
called Horoscopes for the Dead,

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and the first poem
is called "Grave."

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"Grave."

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What do you think
of my new glasses,

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I asked, as I stood
under a shade tree,

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before the joint
grave of my parents.

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And what followed
was a long silence

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that descended on the rows of
the dead, and on the fields,

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and the woods of woods beyond.

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One of the one hundred
kinds of silence

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according to the
Chinese belief, each one

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distinct from the others,
but the differences

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being so faint that only
a few special monks were

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able to tell them all apart.

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They make you look
very scholarly, I heard

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my mother say, once I
lay down on the ground

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and pressed an ear
into the soft grass.

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Then I rolled over and
pressed my other ear

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to the ground, the ear my
father likes to speak into,

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but he would say nothing.

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And I could not find a
silence among the one hundred

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Chinese silences that would fit
the one that he created, even

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though I was the
one who had just

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made up the business of the
one hundred Chinese silences--

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the Silence of the Night Boat,
and the Silence of the Lotus,

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cousin to the Silence
of the Temple Bell,

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only deeper and softer, like
petals, at its farthest edges.

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[APPLAUSE]

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