WEBVTT

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"In the old paintings of
the Italian Renaissance

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they made of the human
capacity for limits

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an allegory and a dance.

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It was the story of Three
Graces, appetite for life

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meets chaste restraint,
and the result is beauty.

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The dance resembles
wheeling constellations.

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One would like to
think that beauty

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moves the IMF and
the World Bank,

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that the black and white
flash of a flock of buntings

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in October wind headed
south toward winter habitat

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would find that the December
fields their kind has

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known and mated in for
30 centuries or more

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were still intact.

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That they will not go the way of
the long billed Arctic curlews

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who flew from Newfoundland to
Patagonia in every weather,

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and are gone now from the tides
on Earth, the last of them

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seen by any human alit
in a Texas marsh in 1964.

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It will tell her that
the gleaming appliance

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that kept her milk
cold in the night

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was made with
chlorofluorocarbons.

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Lucretius, your
master Epictetus was

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right in a general
way about atoms.

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It turns out they
are electricity

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having sex in an infinite
variety of permutations.

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Plato's yearning
has a separate being

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multiplied in all the ways
that all the shapes on Earth

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are multiple.

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Complex.

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The philosopher who said,
the world was made of fire

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was also right.

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These chlorofluorocarbons
react with ozone.

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They've eaten the hole
above the tropopause

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where oxygen breeds ozone
out of ultraviolet light.

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The book will tell her that.

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It won't tell her
that whenever there's

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a flash flood in Washington,
DC, which is usually in spring,

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storm drains disgorge the
excrements of Senators

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into the slow river
which flows past housing

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projects, underfunded
schools, where

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the young pledge allegiance and
are taught to read, when they

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are taught to read, a book
with the title like Getting

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to Know Your Planet.

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There may be photographs
of pools of oil.

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The mud of the
rainbow boa curled

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at the center of the Earth,
according to the old Quechuan

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stories of La Selva, where the
great trees house the 10,000

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kinds of beetle, reptiles no
eye has ever seen changing color

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in the hot, green,
unchanging leaves whenever

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the faint breeze stirs
them above an understory

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of bromiliads and orchids
whose womb or mouth

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like flowers are the shapes
of desire in human dreams.

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And butterflies, larger than her
palms held up to catch a ball

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or ward off fear.

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Along the river,
wide leaved banyans

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where flocks of noisy parrots,
fruit eaters and nut eaters,

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rise in successive flares
of blue and yellow.

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It will seem like
poetry forgetting

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its promise of sobriety, to
say that the rosy shinings

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in the thick brown current are
dolphins rising to the surface

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where gouts of the oil that
burns in the engine of the car

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I'm driving oozes
from the banks.

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The book will try to
tell her what life is,

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give her the amazement of
it, flung off from the sun.

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A molten core still
pouring rivers

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of black basalt across
the Earth sometimes

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from the old fountains
of its origin.

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Then the long cooling,
the unexpected essentially

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miraculous bacteria
that grew green pigment,

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broke down carbon dioxide
gases, took in the carbon,

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turned it into sugar, gave
off molecules of oxygen

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the child on her way to school
is breathing, and so bred life.

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Something about DNA.

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The curled, musical
ladder of sugars.

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Something about consciousness,
how it came to be,

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and how it wrote the
book she's reading.

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How some almost biped
mammal stopped in some task

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and gazed at stars so
bright they seem to creak,

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and uttered a wondering,
guttural Gah, or Earth, to say,

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where am I?

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I am here.

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Or probably, in glittering
dark, I am here.

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Where am I?"

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