WEBVTT

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Here's another one to Laura.

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At this point,
she was writing me

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and she was always putting me
in this role situation, which

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is hard, you know, when it's
a student and a teacher.

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But, I mean, we were friends.

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And I was getting
really annoyed because I

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had to be the strong one and
she was poor little old Laura.

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And so she wrote
me a poem in which

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she was setting this up once
again and this is a response.

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As I was getting ready
to write this poem,

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I had been reading the
New York Review of Books

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and happened to cross a woodcut
illustration for some article.

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It was by Gauguin
It was a woodcut

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of a woman, which
I'll describe in here.

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And across the corner
of the woodcut,

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it says soyez mystérieux:
be mysterious.

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And so this poem is
called Flood and that's

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because on Laura's poem, it
said-- it had a rubber stamp.

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We did this rubber
stamp exchange

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as part of these poems, too.

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And she was working for
Fireman's Fund Insurance,

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so she used a rubber
stamp that said flood.

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Her flood insurance, maybe,
so I called this Flood.

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Do you see the mysteries
of making poems?

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There's someone sometime
in a panic in your mind.

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You hide behind my
hot indifference

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which you imagine wearily
to be conceptually

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strong as celluloid
intelligence.

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But over here, where it's
dark out, I'm just me.

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Feeling uneasy in these
nights cold and black,

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I turn the heat up higher,
thinking other people's lives

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are warmer.

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Suffer the suspicion
I'm mediocre.

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Remembering how Gauguin
whispered, be mysterious,

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into wood he cut it soyez
mystérieux above the backside

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of a female body lying perfectly
voluptuous in mud or sleeping

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was it?

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As if pillowed and dreamy with
her legs explicitly not there,

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but held in darkness
under wild waves

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curling where his
tool entered wood,

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showing us his choice
for her, impacted

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in the prolonged watery beat,
always sleeping face sideways

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with flesh of body,
soft, white, wanting

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to nod out of what the
next cut might reveal.

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The message moves forward like a
Ouija board with its own hands,

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soyez mystérieux.

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You get the joke.

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Babyhood becomes us and is
still yours for one night.

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I offer it as evidence
and then it's my turn.

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Now you be the strong one,
lady mama, queen somebody.

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A slant, you appear in relief,
but feel yourself moving out

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of the old female sleep.

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You hear the intellect
of cells turning over.

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Recognize in another's
gaze a different subject,

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not merely you and me, not even
representational or seductive,

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but hungry for breakfast
under waking Pacific sky

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and eager to swim out.

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I want to turn this body
over, show you her face awake

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and askew, imperfectly
ready to rewrite

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the flood, nothing in the way,
all of the body seen in motion.

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