WEBVTT

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The next poem I'm going
to read is called Windows

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and was written after a
particularly difficult time

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for me.

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We'd moved from a beautiful
house in the country-

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[MOTORCYCLE REVS IN DISTANCE]

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[LAUGHTER]

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Where you couldn't
hear a motorcycle.

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[LAUGHTER]

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[MOTORCYCLE REVS]

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Tucson, home of
the Hell's Angels.

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I always wondered about
you guys out here.

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Well, we moved from,
as I was saying,

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trying to be professorial.

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We moved from a
house in the country

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to a small house in town,
in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

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And it was a very small town.

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And it was a very small house.

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The study where I had to work
in was about six feet long

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and about a foot
and a half wide.

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And had a window, which
was above your body.

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So you could only look up
occasionally and see, perhaps,

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a waving tree.

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I blame this room entirely
for not being able to write.

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And it was good to have a room
like that, for that reason.

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When I finally broke out of a
writing slump of about a year,

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I wrote this poem
called Windows.

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And I can thank the window
in this tiny little room

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for the poem.

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Windows.

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The window's site is small.

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A branch with leaves, some
trees swaying in the background.

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A dimensionless guy behind
it, wavering with clouds.

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Inside, there is less.

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The home, its desk, shapes
of furniture, so much idle

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thought.

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The window is a bridge of glass.

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A surface to see through.

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A stranger's face.

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In its frame, there
is an artless picture,

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a dull form in slow motion,
the psychology of discontent.

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There is a window in the hand's
palm, in the drinking glass.

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Soon enough, it all adds up.

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There is a place where the inner
and outer worlds must touch,

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but don't.

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Where yes and no make no sense.

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Perhaps the vandal who breaks
a window, the burglar who

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travels through it, do
battle with boredom.

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Break the surface of the
world as it appears to us.

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Or at night, when no world
appears beyond the window,

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and we settle for less.

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What we see in its
reflection is what

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we want, but don't believe in.

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Things we couldn't bear to love.

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The first time I read that
poem was in New York City

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and I got home from the reading
to find that there was a phone

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call from my wife in Ohio.

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To find out that our house
had been burglarized.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I didn't know that
burglars read poetry,

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but if you're out there,
I want the TV back.

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[LAUGHTER]

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