WEBVTT

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So I thought I had it made.

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I thought I was the pale figure
the landscape I was born in,

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but could be transformed
by making it out of paper

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as if it were tissue collage.

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And I thought well, the paper
will be the ultimate suitor.

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That's where I can go next
and of course the epigraph

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is always chosen last.

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And the epigraph for this
book is from a letter

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that Vincent van Gogh
wrote to his brothers.

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And it says, "I had
begun to sign canvases

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but I soon stopped because
it seemed too foolish.

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On one seascape, there is
a clamorous red signature

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because I wanted a red
note in the green."

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So I thought I had my identity
down pat, the red signature.

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Not because I think
that I'm so important

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but because I wanted it
for the sake of the design

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this sense of form that
Alison was talking about.

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But then that horizon that ends
that book when it comes closer,

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that arrives at arm's length.

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The way a painter holds
up a thumb to get scale.

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But when things
start coming close

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and they start coming to
houses, then what you get

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are doors, windows,
porches, liminal places

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where one thing becomes another,
where inside becomes outside.

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And the exuberance of being out
the lone figure in landscape

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with all of the people
nicely ensconced

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underneath their names
whether they're gravestones

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yet or not, the memorial impulse
of poetry is to put them there.

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What I found instead that
was my life became tumultuous

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and that the position of
the suitor on the porch

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comes knocking on the door.

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Somebody looking out
the window that I

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was going to have to name that
figure the penultimate suitor

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not prepared yet to say what
might be or who might be,

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the ultimate suitor.

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And so these window figures
started cropping up.

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Just a short poem to
give you a flavor.

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"Man in top half of dutch door."

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Think about a dutch door as
a door becoming a window so

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that this part of you
can go out forever

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and ever, but from the waist
down you feel constricted.

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"Man in top half of dutch door."

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"He stays inside
for indiscernibility

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like tears beneath closed lids.

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Closed lids describe a
shallow scalloped border.

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The kitten's muse describe
a shallow scalloped border.

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Dusk erases chances,
moots a day,

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invites a second widening
of sight and sound

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and of his need
to convey himself

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expanding broad rotations."

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