WEBVTT

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D.M. THOMAS: I'm now going
to do a very rash thing.

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I'm going to read
part of my only poem

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which has Arizona in it.

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I couldn't resist the temptation
because I'll probably never

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visit here again.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I mean, you'll
never have me again.

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Not that I won't want to come.

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[LAUGHTER]

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It's a long poem
called, "Two Voices,"

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and I'd like to read with Peter
the first six sections of it.

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I must set the scene.

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It came out of being in
America about four years ago

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in Minnesota.

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And a woman there told me about
something of her recent life.

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And her story moved me, and
mixed in with certain themes

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I had in my mind already.

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She had felt betrayed.

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Her whole life was
a sense of betrayal.

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Her father had committed suicide
when she was an adolescent

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and she felt that therefore he
had betrayed her, he had said,

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I don't love you.

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And then a boyfriend had made
her pregnant and left her.

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She had wandered to
Arizona half in search

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of an abortionist unsure
whether to do it or not.

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In fact, eventually she
didn't, she bore the baby.

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I imagine in this
poem that she feels

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that at the moment of birth, if
she allows the baby to be born,

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a third man will betray her.

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Someone who is ready
to press the button.

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Because while I
was in Minnesota,

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the first thing which struck
me coming from England,

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were the enormous number
of fallout shelter signs.

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And this really terrified me.

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And gave me a sense of
doom which mixed with hers.

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In the poem, I read a sort of
description of her feelings

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and interwoven with
this, it's a kind

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of science fiction
story of astronauts

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at a far planet suddenly
seeing the Earth explode

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and wanting to come back.

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It's such an explosion
that, it even

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makes a rift in the
dimension of time.

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Suddenly they are shifted
2000 years in the future

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so that there is
no hope of meeting

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any of their loved ones.

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But they come back to the
Earth, they travel back.

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Kind of Odyssey.

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Out of piety more than anything.

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You can imagine this
really is the girl's

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drug-induced illusion that her
father and/or her boyfriend is

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returning at last.

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The images of Arizona,
which I get wrong,

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please blame them on her
because I took it from what

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she told me, not on me.

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"Two Voices."

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The towel unstained.

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By now, she realized it had
sailed past the blood islands

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was rocking into a full sea.

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Storms lashed it, hers.

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But still it survived.

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Its grotesque head stubbornly
riding her witchcraft.

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And love too that intermittent
pharos littered on this journey

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to a lost father past
her reefs and whirlpools.

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A following wind blew
from her dry coast.

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To aid it, to wreck it,
she fainted in class.

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Her friends kind.

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She guessed, they guessed.

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Tongues flayed him.

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When the vital spark,
when the heart pulses,

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not murder until a
snake or bird no more.

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By day, she knit a coat
each night unscathed.

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PETER REDGROVE:
Rubbing out half Orion.

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Blood Islands hung
in the black sky.

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McAlister noticed it first.

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Puzzled, he lifted his glasses.

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Called to the others.

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They came stumbling,
clumsy in their suits.

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They stared for a long
time, incredulous.

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What were they?

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The Red Islands.

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And the new bright star a
few degrees from Betelgeuse.

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Some knew Nova may be.

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My God, can't you
see, it's Earth.

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Burkhardt cried.

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His words, his elegy
tailing into a sob.

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Damn it.

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You're right.

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Hissed Christesen.

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McAlister was silent.

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Three men-- magi, their hearts
hammered at a small globe's

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transfiguration.

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What could a man do
but fix his thoughts

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on the few heartbeats
who had been his Earth.

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Each of them stood finally
in his good selfishness.

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Christesen, the farm in Wyoming,
McAlister, the house in Ohio,

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Burkhardt, the
apartment in Minnesota.

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Who can mourn a globe, a
country, a city at once?

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Burkhardt knelt.
The rest followed.

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Not to pray exactly but to make
the only gesture of defeat.

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They knew could simply
watch as the violet glow

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and the red ovals faded.

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Chimerae, mirages leaving
the molten planet,

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drifting West, now
blocking Aldebaran.

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It was on time, still
leashed to the sun.

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Fiery as at first.

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Then the rings
swung up concealing.

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THOMAS: "The desert
is happy," she mused.

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It has so little and it suffers
so much, but it's happy.

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She walked without
shoes treading

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the grid of the Arizona sand.

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Water, they can
hoard for months.

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So simple to live on a shower.

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Grateful for the
one cloud smudge

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between impermeable
ultramarines.

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Shells, only the old are here.

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Frenzied activity
of bowls and square

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dancing and tricycling
after dinner.

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Trailer on trailer, senior
citizens, flowery t-shirts

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and Bermuda shorts cherishing
their shrunk or flaccid limbs

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in the heat of the Phoenix.

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Less alive than cactus limbs,
which if you cut yield water.

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A lifetime's effort--
husbandry has paid off

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in this late Renaissance
of atrocious paintings.

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Phoenix, a dying man deep
frozen stored to await a cure.

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On a bus, she read this.

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Her eyes clenched shut.

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Where the dying have
so much greed for life,

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how to kill you, child.

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REDGROVE: The
chronometers that had

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stopped during that eternity of
rending, buckling, screaming,

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metal wheeled bodies.

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They had sworn a giant meteor
storm had hold of them.

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But the radar clear moved again.

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It felt as though they'd broken
through some crystal barrier

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a God had erected to prevent
the run in to Jupiter.

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"What's happened?"

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Asked Christesen
drawn, dry mouthed,

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finding a voice at last.

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Check all the readings.

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The ship they found had held.

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Only the sun spectral
analysis, a minute

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but precise but vertical leap
towards red was different.

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Time faults.

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They stared at
each other like men

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jumping over ever widening,
ever opening ice cracks.

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They leapt from
alternative to alternative,

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but slipped at last
almost with relief

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into the abyss of
Burckhardt's theory.

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"How long?"

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McAlister asked.

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Not that it makes any
difference, of course.

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Burkhardt studied the plates.

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Not long, he said at last--

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2000, 3,000 Earth years.

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They could say the word
now for many months

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it had stayed taboo,
unrepeatable somehow

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like a dead primitives name.

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Not long compared to the
time slide of a million years

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Mount Palomar suspected
when Gamma Booitis exploded.

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A mere hairline fractured
along the time dimension,

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but then it wasn't
a major explosion.

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Irony skimmed over
the tremors of shock.

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The biggest telescopes and
Andromedas won't even see it.

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Then what happened to our--

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there was no need to finish
McAlister's question.

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The cabins silent with their
grief's battering noises.

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THOMAS: Her own flat
solitude nursing

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its stealthy, tiny, enormous,
hateful, blessing, arteries cut

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through drought land to feed
the secret assembly of elements

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born in a star's interior
billions of years ago.

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Made her shudder when
that place of a lesser

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gestation in a smaller desert--

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Los Alamos hove up
on the route signs.

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Made her clutch her belly
in fierce possession.

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Later, her flesh browning,
two tarantulas ferry union,

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a small sand whipped
furnace between rocks.

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Extermination of lust
made her shiver again

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for taste or memory.

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Once is enough, she thought.

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One thoughtless,
unscrupulous finger.

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Once.

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REDGROVE: Those cries we hear,
those burnt flayed faces--

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mirages, like the red islands
we saw bobbing about the sky.

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Burkhardt laughed bleakly.

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They would simply
have disappeared.

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The world exploded.

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The detonation triggered a time
shift, an infinitesimal one.

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The crater reaching
beyond Jupiter but not

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so far as Saturn.

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We being, as it
were, spectators.

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Staring numbly over the
crater, yawning at our feet.

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Our house gone.

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One moment they were
there, the next, nothing.

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Or rather the
scattered dust, they

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would be two or 3,000 years on.

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"A comfort," he said.

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"A comfort."

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No one suffered.

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No one.

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It was just like a film.

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When the real is being
missed out in the darkroom,

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no one notices.

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The house is empty, there is
no one to set up a hooting.

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Nobody suffered.

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Jupiter nearing,
freefall held them.

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As in some immune sterile
indifferent glove,

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a surgeon holds a hysterectomy.

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THOMAS: One thoughtless,
unscrupulous finger.

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She stood windowed at her
hotel in her slip for the heat.

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Automobiles honking towards
pileups and scrap yards.

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Shells in America's mid-century
literal, skyscrapers

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ghosted by a Puritan keel.

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His finger too that sprang the
ignition behind closed garage

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doors was his final way of
saying, I never loved you.

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His head resting on
the wheel, his hands

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folded white in his lap.

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A gesture of washing.

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All I remember is a phone
call, except my high school

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teacher smoothing my back.

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For hours she smoothed my
back till I calmed down.

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They were bringing him
home from New Jersey then.

00:12:45.040 --> 00:12:49.780 align:middle line:84%
The third finger, I shall
not know but it is coming.

00:12:49.780 --> 00:12:55.090 align:middle line:84%
It will come as I open my thighs
for the second time only ever.

00:12:55.090 --> 00:12:59.980 align:middle line:84%
The third crowing of the
male cock in my life.

00:12:59.980 --> 00:13:03.640 align:middle line:84%
Reaching for the phone,
girl in a white slip

00:13:03.640 --> 00:13:05.980 align:middle line:84%
lifted above the
knees with the swell.

00:13:05.980 --> 00:13:09.910 align:middle line:84%
On the seventh floor
of the Hotel Phoenix,

00:13:09.910 --> 00:13:14.770 align:middle line:84%
she thought of the mice who
crowded beyond endurance crawl

00:13:14.770 --> 00:13:19.880 align:middle line:90%
up the sides of the cage to die

00:13:19.880 --> 00:13:21.380 align:middle line:90%
Thank you.

00:13:21.380 --> 00:13:24.730 align:middle line:90%
[APPLAUSE]

00:13:24.730 --> 00:13:34.000 align:middle line:90%