WEBVTT

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I'm going to skip ahead and read
from Self-portrait in a Convex

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Mirror, just the end of
a kind of longish poem

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because it seemed to
have an Arizona setting.

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I've actually never set
foot in Arizona before,

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but I did go through
it on a train once.

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So I feel I might
have been influenced

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by the look of the state.

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This is the end of the
poem "Grand Galop."

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"Ask a hog what is happening.

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Go on, ask him.

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The road just seems
to vanish and not that

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far in the distance either.

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The horizon must
have been moved up,

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so it is that by
limping carefully

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from one day to the next, one
approaches a worn, round stone

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tower, crouching low in
the hollow of a gully,

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with no door or window but a lot
of old license plates tacked up

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over a slit, too narrow
for a wrist to pass through

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and a sign--

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Van Camp's pork and beans.

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From then on, in angst colored
skies, emotional withdrawals,

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as the whole business
starts to frighten even you,

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its originator and promoter.

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The horizon returns as
a smile of recognition.

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This time polite, unquestioning.

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How long ago high
school graduation seems,

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yet it cannot have
been so very long.

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One has traveled such
a short distance.

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The styles haven't
changed much, and I still

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have a sweater and one or
two other things I had then.

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It seems only yesterday
that we saw the movie

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with the cows in it and turned
to one at your side who burped.

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As morning saw a new
garnet and pea-green order

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propose itself out of the
endless bathos like science

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fiction lumps, impossible not
to be moved by the tiny number

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those people wore,
indicating they should be

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raised to this or that power.

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But now, we are at Cape
Fear and the overland trail

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is impassable and a
dense curtain of mist

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hangs over the sea."

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I guess some other states
got in there as well.

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[LAUGHING]

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