WEBVTT

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Here's a more meditative poem
on the same subject called

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Depression Beginning in 1956.

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This mood is not mirrored
in the weather raining,

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nor can it be cured
by the usual remedies.

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It is a mood unlike the
geography of rivers,

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without a source,
all to general,

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like a conversation with a
stranger, a way of living

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you've adjusted to.

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Only you haven't shaken the
feeling something's wrong.

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Your wife is off
with someone else

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where you would like to be.

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Your father's sitting
in a chair one

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July is a thought you have
now, in a time before air

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conditioners, sweating
through his shirt.

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You think what he is thinking.

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Should he buy a new
house, get a divorce?

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Should he vote for a Democrat
who has no chance to win?

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Should he help your
mother in the kitchen,

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though he doesn't
want to see her again?

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He's not sitting in that chair
now, so he must have moved

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or something moved in him.

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The lesson you want to learn
is how we change ourselves, how

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we move from past to future.

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If we follow the movement of
the flowers and the trees,

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which we don't, we would know
it's not through consciousness.

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The lilac that blooms at night
knows nothing about change.

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Nor is it something large what
we do in the eyes of others.

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What do the branches
care for the leaves

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when they grow up or down?

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And yet your father
is remarried,

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he voted for a Democrat, he's
somewhere else in Arizona, free

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of trees.

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At last, something good
is happening to him.

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Why couldn't it be your
mood that's changed?

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What would it take to remove
yourself from this feeling?

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There is this weight of the
present mode of helplessness.

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It's not a great disaster
that makes us change,

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but a strengthening of will
combined with circumstance.

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Nature has nothing
to do with it now,

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though it might have
in the past when

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we understood the motion of
animals against the trees.

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We are not animals now,
nor could we choose to be.

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Though we choose sometimes
the pastoral and lovely,

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it is never quite enough
to leave the melancholy

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we've come to know.

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And if that mood
should pass, we think

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it was some miracle
or strength or someone

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else we love coming to our aid.

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And we'd be wrong
in part and right

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in ways we can't define in
love or sometimes change.

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