WEBVTT

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This is a longer poem
on the same subject.

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It's called "Heroic Simile."

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And it begins with
the image from a movie

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like Akira Kurosawa's
Seven Samurai.

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But the idea I had in
mind from the title

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was of those elaborate
process metaphors in Homer

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that go on and on and on.

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A guy doesn't fall.

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He falls like a
tree, and the tree

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falls in somebody's property,
and litigation ensues,

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and it goes on and on and
on with this terrific sense

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of action that Homer has.

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Anyway.

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It's about going to the
movies, "Heroic Simile."

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"When the swordsmen fell
in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai

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in the gray rain, in Cinemascope
and the Tokugawa dynasty,

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he fell straight as a pine,
he fell as Ajax fell in Homer

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and chanted dactyl
and the tree was

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so huge the woodsman
returned for two days

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to that lucky place before
he was done with the sawing

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and on the third day
he brought his uncle.

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They stacked logs
in the resonance

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air, hacking the
small limbs off,

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tying those bundles separately.

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The slabs near the root
were quartered, and still,

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they were awkwardly large;
the logs from mid-tree they

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halved--

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10 bundles in four great
piles of fragrant wood, moons

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and quarter moons and half
moons ridged by the saw's tooth.

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The woodsman and the
old man his uncle

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are standing in midforest on a
floor of pine silt and spring

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mud.

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They have stopped working
because they are tired

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and because I have imagined no
pack animal or primitive wagon.

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They are too canny
to call in neighbors

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and come home with a few
logs after three days' work.

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They're waiting for
me to do something

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or for the overseer of the Great
Lord to come and arrest them.

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How patient they are!

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The old man smokes
a pipe and spits.

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The young man is
thinking he would be rich

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if he were already
rich and had a mule.

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10 days of hauling
and on the seventh

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they'll probably be caught,
go home empty-handed or worse.

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I don't know whether they're
Japanese or Mycenaean

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and there's nothing I can do.

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The path from here to that
village is not translated.

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A hero, dying, gives off
stillness to the air.

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A man and a woman
walk from the movies

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to the house in the silence
of separate fedilities.

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There are limits
to imagination."

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