WEBVTT

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This next poem is
called "Red Runner."

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I suppose I see running
as a kind of torture,

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and it always intrigues me to
see all the people, wherever

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I am, torturing themselves.

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I was in Alaska for
the month of June

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where I saw the red
runner torturing herself.

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She comes at me in
red tights showing

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satin skin underneath, and red
shorts, a red runner's jacket--

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like a bird I don't
expect to see in the rain.

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Thinking of fires I
have built, and how

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flames are not gratuitous.

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How hard it is to get even
combustible material to burn.

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I wonder how she burns through
this continuous rain of Juno,

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this runner, young woman,
product of the 20th century.

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When I passed her, we exchanged
rather frank, brutal glances.

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She saw a middle-aged woman
bundled in a coat walking fast

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for her short legs.

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Probably, to this red
runner, I appeared

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to be some slow sea
creature crawling

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along the bottom of the ocean.

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She ran past me like
firecrackers or sequins

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glittering on a dancer's
costume, a bottle of Tabasco

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which had put on Adidas,
and irrelevantly, I

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think of Carmen Miranda movies.

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But this rain has come to
mean that things don't change.

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When you reach a certain
age, even the flame

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of a red-satin-shorted runner
coming like a can-can girl out

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of the silver twilight
was not so much

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a change as a proof of sameness.

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Red runner--
reminder that I live

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if not in another time, another
world, one where a flame is not

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easy to coax into life.

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One where I am outdated, or
extinguished, or underwater.

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Certainly no
location for a flame.

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Tonight, with a blue
sweater, her red jacket

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tied around her waist,
red shorts again--

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this time her legs naked
and white as sea scallops--

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she frowned as she
passed me again.

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Scorpion fish.

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Sea slug.

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Slow mover in the
silvery twilight.

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