WEBVTT

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Don Thomas wrote and
read a poem about hair.

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It was one of the
powerful secondary sexual

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characteristics of people that
gather you up and give you

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a universe doors
into this universe

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of the other half of the world.

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And I have mine here, too.

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But this one doesn't talk about
music, talks about water--

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still water, which may be
the same thing, in fact,

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because they both flow.

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Now this poem is called "Young
Women with the Hair of Witches

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and No Modesty."

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And in it, I think of a person
who has always loved water

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and praised water, as
I've been trying to do

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in the last couple of poems.

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But he's fallen in
love with a witch.

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A witch woman, a woman
with beautiful hair.

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And this hair is to him as
though all the flux and flow

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of the world have become
focused and arrested and almost

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petrified in his
concern for this woman.

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For which the hair is the sign
and symbol of her sexuality.

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And they are all
this concern of his

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for the universe is
gathered in this one

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image, this woman, this hair.

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And so he speaks about this
and where water cannot betray,

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a woman can.

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And he is so subject to
the moods of this woman

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that he speaks this small elegy
for the loss of an innocence.

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I give it the
epigraph from Hamlet.

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"I loved Ophelia."

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I have always loved
water and praised it.

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I have often wished
water would hold still.

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Changes and glints
bemuse a man terribly.

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There is champagne
and glimmer of mists.

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Torrents, the distaffs of
themselves, exalted, confused.

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And snow splintering silently,
skilfully, indifferently.

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I have often wished
water would hold still.

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Now it does so, or
ripples so, skillfully.

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In cross and double cross,
surcross and counter cross.

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A person lives in the darkness
of it watching gravely.

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I used to see her straight
and cool considering the pond.

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And as I approached, she would
turn gracefully in her hair.

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Its waves betraying her origin.

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I told her that her
thoughts issued in hair

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like consideration of water.

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And if she laughed,
that they would

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rain like spasms of weeping,
or if she wept then solemnly

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they held still.

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And in the rain, the perfumes
of it, and the blowing of it,

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confused, like hosts
of people all shouting.

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In such a world the bride walks
through dressed as a waterfall,

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and ripe grapes fall and splash
smooth snow with jagged purple,

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young girls grow brown as
acorns in their long climb

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towards oakhood, and brown
moths settle low down

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among ivories pale with love.

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But she loosened her
hair in a sudden tangle

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of contradictions, in cross
and double cross, surcross

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and counter cross, and I
was a shadow in the twilight

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of her late displeasure.

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I asked water to stand still,
now nothing else holds."

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