WEBVTT

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Thank you.

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I think.

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It's true about the ferret,
though, and the mice.

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How did you remember that
after all these years?

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I once shared my bed with a
ferret without meaning to.

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And the story isn't half
as interesting as the fact,

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so we'll just leave
it right there.

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Thank you all for
coming tonight.

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And thank you to
the Poetry Center

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for asking me to come
from Pennsylvania.

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This is called "On the
Seventh Anniversary of the US

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Invasion of Afghanistan."

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"Your body is a white pallet
covering a sacrifice of gills.

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Some moons clement misanthropy.

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I do not mean it
does not love us,

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only that inside the ash
gold camber physics makes,

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your breath exerts a gravity
trapped in winter's porcelain

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teeth through which hunger, like
some history, keeps appearing.

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The dogs run round and round
the salt well of your hair,

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barking.

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I almost wrote banking.

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In the language of fur
coats, something already

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dead and ornamental, a
bamboo grove in January,

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offering its own
guided tour of the war.

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Its broad cranium.

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Its massive hips.

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Sometimes I think we are all
figures in a portrait war

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is painting.

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Other times, the canvas
on which war paints.

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If I say devotion is a candle
in the shape of a bell,

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you are already 6,000 miles
away from the neighboring place

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setting, a French
forest through which

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soldiers sight my sister bent
low over thrust smoking flare.

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I like to imagine it, in
this penultimate moment,

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as a breathing thing that
turns in current with eyes

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that magnify, that
feels pain after all.

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Scientists now maintain what we
call darkness, it calls desert.

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Before language, there
was this idea of language.

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To record the empathy, the
mirage, the attractions

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of both chance and surgery.

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Of body to bomb.

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The chapped hand of the one
who stoops now to trouble

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this water."

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