WEBVTT

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It's good to be back
in the Southwest.

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I had actually, after I went
to school in New Mexico,

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lived in Kansas for a while.

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And now I'm living
back home, where

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it was 34 degrees
when I left yesterday.

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So very good to be
back in the Southwest.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I'll begin with a poem which
I've actually never read before

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at a reading, in Combing
the Snakes from His Hair.

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It's called "Sustaining
This Massive Shade."

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It was written on a
morning, after a night out

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in a Lawrence, Kansas bar, where
I was confusing the Rimbaud I'd

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been reading with
the conversation I

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had with my favorite bartender.

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So it came out of an odd way.

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"Sustaining This Massive Shade."

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"Of all that is left
to occur when nothing

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moves, but beneath
my skull a dog

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stretches tremulous forelegs.

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Cicadas drone in every tendon,
while the wind offers nothing

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to keep insects from the skin.

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And still he returns like
the new leaf unfurling.

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In sum, what nightfall
has in store.

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I keep four calendars, he said.

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Beneath one moon I am jealous.

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Of all that touches him,
the rain that doesn't fall

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and the woman that
lies next to him.

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In this age of hands,
where are mine.

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I am intact and I don't care.

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My hands in the garden.

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Corn bleached and
malformed by drought

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beneath the sick of blue.

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I have the white-blue eyes
of my ancestors, he said,

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their narrow skull and their
clumsiness in fighting.

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Fighting to keep my
hand from his belly

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where sleeps a double sex.

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Struggling not to touch the
small bones held in by sandals,

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I take note of his every step.

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Given confidence and
confiding in the agave.

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The cactus mourns
the memory of feeling

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and mysterious
delicacies seduce me.

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That this night would
give up one breath

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to stir the downy hairs
on his golden legs.

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The skin that aches
for want of feather.

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How I move between rooms,
the cattle of longing

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and think only of that curve
at the base of his skull.

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The cowlick clipped to
a choirboy's mean halo.

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I am happy, he said.

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I am jealous.

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Of the planets that seduce
him with greater success

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and the moon that
lights his pale alarm

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when he rises in the night.

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Walk through the
night, gently moving

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that thigh, that second
thigh and that left leg."

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