WEBVTT

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This is a poem called
Meditation at Lagunitas.

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What happened was, I was
talking to a friend who

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was trying to tell me about
contemporary French language

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philosophy.

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And in the course of
it, he told me that--

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mentioned that words like
tree were abstract words.

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And I always thought
words like justice

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were abstract words,
but not words like tree.

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And then he said, well,
all words are abstract.

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I mean, they're not the thing.

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And I realized that I was
horrified by the idea anyway.

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So this poem is
Meditation at Lagunitas.

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All the new thinking
is about loss.

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In this, it resembles
all the old thinking.

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The idea for example,
that each particular

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erases the luminous
clarity of a general idea.

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That the clown-faced woodpecker
probing the dead sculpted trunk

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of that black birch,
is by his presence

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some tragic falling off from a
first world of undivided light.

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Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world

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no one thing to which
the bramble of blackberry

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corresponds.

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A word is elegy to
what it signifies.

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We talked about it
late last night.

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And in the voice of my friend,
there was a thin wire of grief.

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A tone almost querulous.

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After a while, I understood
that talking this way,

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everything dissolves.

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Justice, pine, hair,
woman, you and the eye.

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There was a woman
I made love with,

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and I remembered how holding
her small shoulders in my hands

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sometimes, I felt
a violent wonder

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at her presence, like
a thirst for salt.

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From my childhood river,
with its island willow.

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Silly music from
the pleasure boat,

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muddy places where we caught
the little orange silver

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fish called pumpkin seed.

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It hardly had to do with her.

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Longing we say, because desire
is full of endless distances.

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I must have been
the same to her,

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but I remember so much the way
her hands dismantled bread.

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The thing her father
said that hurt her.

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What she dreamed.

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There are moments when the
body is as numinous as words.

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Days that are the good flesh
continuing, such tenderness.

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Those afternoons and evenings
saying, blackberry, blackberry,

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blackberry.

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