WEBVTT

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Little Shelford,
May 24, the evening.

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"The color of coffee,
highwire, desire, soft glint

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of the English twilight,
had again this morning

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the experience of
going out dazed

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from riding to the bus
stop in a mild rain

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and standing against the
chalky moss-veined stone wall.

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Three girls came by
on bicycles, and they

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spoke in high chirping voices.

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And I thought, that's right.

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I'm in England.

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Orange flower in a contemporary
design on the coffee cup,

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lace under the typewriter,
patient, intricate, medieval.

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The Pre-Raphaelites thought
the Middle Ages were very sexy.

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And we read no more
of that day, pages

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of a book turning in the
wind, green lawn blurry

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in the background, gourd
like belly of a lute,

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delicate feet raised.

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Feet of the girl being fucked
in the white dunes at Big Sur.

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Such a comic sweetness and
the spasms of her toes.

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And I looked away feeling
both shy and voyeuristic,

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would have liked to
climb the dune and watch,

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but watched brown pelicans
hovering and flap, flap,

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beating heavily along the coast
under a thrust of tidal rock.

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Anemones, small green
crabs, as if my not looking

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conferred a blessing.

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Jeffers thought the pelicans
looked like bombers, B-29,

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Second World War, the
first layer of childhood

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and romantic and
movies long afterwards.

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Despite the wars, we
got Korea, Vietnam.

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Korea associated in my mind with
the beginnings of television.

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Gray, the Lone Ranger in my
aunt's house in Green Beret

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and the wonderful oak
forest below her house.

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We walked in silvery
glint of the oak trees.

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My aunt, so ridiculous, and
we were so dependent on her

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at scary times for affection,
felt such craven gratitude

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for her bourgeois ideas.

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You must remember
high-pitched voice

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that look of utter sincerity
whereby a child knows

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instinctively that
he will be told

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something important and untrue.

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You must remember that it's
not your mother's fault.

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It's a terrible illness,
and she can't help it.

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Sanitarium, the word
mixed in my mind

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with crematorium
so that I actually

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believed for the first time
that my mother had been

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taken away and burned alive.

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And my aunt's quavering
voice, the condescending way

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she talked about my
mother and remembered it

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later at Stanford.

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As the tone of women
in 19th century novels

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who did sewing for
the deserving poor.

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But I remember also a guileless
and absolute gratitude,

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children being terrific
opportunists or fatalists

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or whatever, as she let
us watch the masked man

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and his faithful
Indian companion

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ride across the screen in a
blur of the first blue-gray snow

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to the sound of the
William Tell Overture

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and set out for us gruesomely
decorative hard candies

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in a cut glass bowl."

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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