WEBVTT

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I hadn't planned to
read this short poem.

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But I-- well, I asked Dick
Shelton if I could have his

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permission to write one
desert poem as I had and--

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I did live in
Phoenix for a year.

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And he said it was all right,
one short poem for a year.

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It's just a very short
poem called "Zone."

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"In the desert, the snake,
sleeping on the rock,

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lives by the heat it absorbs.

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Nothing in itself, but
the terror you grant it.

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An obscure notion of time, the
circles around a chimney rock,

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the floor of an ocean of air."

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I wrote that poem while I
was sitting on Lake Michigan.

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That's true.

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Now, somebody asked me once if I
wrote about the place I was in.

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And I find that
generally, it's--

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I write about a place very
different from wherever I am.

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If the poem happens to be
about water, of the sea,

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I probably would be in the
desert when I was writing it

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or vice versa.