WEBVTT

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Well I'll conclude
then just with a poem

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which is really about writing.

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It really completes
this full circle.

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Of course, I wrote it after
the death of Louis MacNeice.

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And it's really about
writing undergraduate poems,

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remembering when Louis MacNeice
and I and Auden were together,

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and we showed each other
undergraduate poems.

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And it's called "One More
New Botched Beginning."

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And it's about how a lot
of people who might have

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remembered.

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"Their voices heard,
I stumble suddenly,

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choking in undergrowth.

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I am torn, mouth pressed
against the thorns,

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remembering 10 years ago.

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Here in Geneva, I walked with
Merleau-Ponty by the lake.

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Upon his face, I
saw his intellect.

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Energy of the sun interweaving
waves, electric, danced on him.

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His eyes smiled with their
gay logic through black coins

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flung down from leaves.

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He who was
Merleau-Ponty that day

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is no more irrevocable than the
I that day who was beside him.

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I am still living.

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Also that summer, my son stayed
up the valley in the mountains.

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One day I went to see
him, and he stood, not

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seeing me, watching some hens.

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Doing so, he was absorbed
in their wire netted world.

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He danced on one leg.

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Leaning forward, he
became a bird boy.

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I am there, still seeing him.

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To him, that moment, and
self knowing even then,

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is drowned in the
oblivious earliness.

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Such pasts are not
diminished distances,

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perspective vanishing points,
but doors burst open suddenly

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by gusts that seek to
blow the heart out.

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Today, I see three
undergraduates standing

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talking in a college quad.

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They show each other poems.

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Louis MacNeice, Bernard
Spencer, and I. Louis

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caught cold in the rain.

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Bernard fell from a train door.

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Their lives are now those poems
that were pointers to the poems

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to be their lives.

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We read there in
the college quad.

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Each poem is still
a new beginning.

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If they had been
finished, though, they

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would have died
before they died.

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Being alive is when each
moment's a new start,

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with past and future shuffled
between fingers for a new game.

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I am dealing out
my hand to them,

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one more new botched
beginning here where we still

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stand talking in the quad."

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Thank you.

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