WEBVTT

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This is my most recent
poem and perhaps

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one of the most personal
efforts I've ever made.

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And again, I believe
it's somewhat distanced

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because I didn't know
how else to try at least.

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It was another poem that started
with the luck of happening

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to open a book and see
something written down that

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was interesting.

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So I'll read you
the epigraph first

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which was a Delmore
Schwartz poem that

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was read at his funeral, that's
just a few lines from that.

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And the pears were useless
and soft like used hopes

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under the starlight
small knowledge.

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The Pears.

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At noon, the wasps
clink and whir

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under the pear tree like bits
of brown and yellow fruit

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rising sharply back
into the leaves.

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They dive again where the soft
pears flatten in the grass.

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It's late September
and the whole garden

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is giving up to a
gray collapse while I

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cut the last green tomatoes
with their rust spots.

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They join the garlic, celery,
and dill in clear jars

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I fill with vinegar.

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Our father is dead,
having sickened faster

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than the small
plot of vegetables

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I raised in this gritty
New England soil,

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a sudden wing drooped from his
body while the three of you

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stood by believing in his
death as your private shadow.

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He never told you he
married a girl from Boston

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at 19 who he didn't see again
after she had given birth to me

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one winter morning.

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But I grew up knowing of
you, your faces nearly Asian

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like your mother and wondering
if just one of our features

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were the same, perhaps
his unmistakable eyebrows.

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I can smell the fallen pears
from the window even stronger

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in the evening now, damp
and sweet like a fresh cake.

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The wasps are
sleeping in the eaves.

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It's cooler.

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And in just weeks, those
clouds of gross beaks

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will start descending
morning and night

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to feed in the yard in the
broken sticks of the garden.

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The pears will have melted
by the roots of the tree

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like they never existed
even in the memory

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of chilly wasps fat and dying
in their gray paper nests.

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You have buried our
father out where

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it's always summer
near a garden of keoki,

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pink lotus, and Jasmine--

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perhaps you finally
learned of me.

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The facts of death not
included in his life.

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He might think of me then as
a blonde working in a dress

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store, as impossible
as halves of a pear

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left out to be shared
fairly by an odd number

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of difficult children.

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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