WEBVTT

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--what follows a whole
series of about half a dozen

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or so live poems.

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And it's like turning around.

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I thought, at least
when I started,

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it was like turning
around and trying

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to catch myself in the
act in some kind of way

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and call it so as to stop it.

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And found that by the time
I'd written even half a dozen

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of these poems,
that it was going

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to be a real snap to
catch myself with this,

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to catch myself at that.

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And I was going to be
real little master,

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sitting down, writing the
poems that caught me at that,

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that caught me on this.

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And it wasn't really
changing that much.

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I wasn't doing very
much at all, except sort

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of indulging the kinds
of misery that I was

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for sure feeling at the time.

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But suddenly, it
become a next and it

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was just a further expression
or generation of that misery.

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Had nothing to do
with anything else.

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So my original theory of, all
right, I'm feeling very badly.

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So if I just let myself sink,
I'll touch bottom and then

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kick off again, proved
to be totally irrelevant

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and came the time when
you sort of realize,

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OK, you're floundering
around in this stuff,

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and you'll be there as
long as you want to.

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So why?

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Ain't no bottom.

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There's no bother at all.

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This poem then was the
last of the lie poems.

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I think I hear
that familiar hum.

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The thing of the old
wives tale of cats

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sucking the breath
out of babies,

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which, in a number
of my poems, I've

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been very pleased to find
out that the images that I

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based the poems around
have been fallacious ones.

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Earlier, I read a poem about
a black widow, for instance.

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You remember one of
the first poems I read.

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The black widow looming by
the dry shell of her mate

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and so on.

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I think that's almost cliche the
idea of that particular image

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for instance of the
female, certainly

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of the female black widow
that she kills the male spider

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after she mates with it.

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Well, it may be a very
engaging kind of image

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for, anyhow, a certain
set of mind, male minds,

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to think that, I was really
delighted to find out

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that that's not at all
how, in fact, it works,

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that there's a very complicated
system of signaling things

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that a male is supposed to go
through once he's been invited

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on to the web of a female as she
signals him when she's sexually

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prepared and so on.

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And this is from the
Helstrom Chronicles,

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by the way, if you
know that movie.

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There was a part of the
movie which was edited out

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and which the producer described
on one of those talk shows

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at night.

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And it's a shame
they didn't leave it

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in because what
they did leave in

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was the original image of
woman as predator and so on.

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Whereas what was really
true was the male

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is required to say to
give a set of signals.

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He tugs on this in
that part of the web.

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And he's like programmed.

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And he tugs and tugs and
all this kind of thing.

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And then finally, once
he's identified himself

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as a black widow, is what it
amounts to as a black widow

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spider, she invites him to
come on, and he comes on.

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And then they mate.

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And then the tricky
part is that he

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has to remember to signal again
before he leaves the nest.

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And apparently, what happens,
understandably enough,

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is that very often, he'll forget
to signal to get off the net.

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And when he forgets,
she'll eat him--

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[LAUGHTER]

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--presumably because she
thinks he's a fly or something.

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But anyhow, he has to give
that code leaving as well.

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And then I thought, how
much more interesting

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that is to play around with
than the other image after all.

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So anyway, this
one is on the cats.

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And it turns out, of course,
not to be true either.

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Cats don't suck the
breath out of children.

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They just lick the
milk off their lips.

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"My eyes become a good
pet, admitted and pampered

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by an old lady upstairs in me.

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She stirs from her rocking only
to refill their bowl with dust

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urged from her breast.

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Then she'll lace with the
crushed glass, the bits of meat

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made of the newborn and tossed
at midnight to the neighbors,

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to the neighbors of beasts.

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These, she despises for their
ominous good health and size.

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Nightly, she reviews the
subtle bodies of her own

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and admires their perfect
grace as her fingers

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curl and close in
the painful dark that

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keeps her as she would be kept.

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She pulls the shades.

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I close my eyes.

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We sleep, giving
the house entirely

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to things that purr and
settle for the warmth

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of our still body
and our breath."

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