WEBVTT

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I think my voice will hold
out for a few new ones,

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if that's OK with you all.

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OK.

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So these I pulled
from the manuscript

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that Tyler said I was
arranging on my bed.

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Today I came with 130
poems, which I realized

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there's a lot more than a book.

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I didn't know how much I
had until I printed it all.

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And I was like, Oh OK,
apparently I've got it.

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But I winnowed it down to
75 today, which is good.

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I feel bad for that
stack on my bed.

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Oh, again.

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Next book.

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Yeah, maybe they'll-- maybe
they won't get left behind after

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all.

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You never know.

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I actually have a
poem in my first-- two

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poems in my first book and
a poem in my second book

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that came out three
years ago that I

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wrote in 1998 as an undergrad.

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And I saved it and it just fit
with the fairy tale poems I

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was writing for my second book.

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So there-- there is a
poem that 20-year-old

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me wrote that went
into that second book,

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and it just was
waiting for its time.

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OK.

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So these, I think,
will make the cut.

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Although I don't know if they're
done yet, so bear with me.

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Wife For Scale.

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This is a tender age.

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And in geologic time,
hardly an age at all.

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But a golden band of
rock pressed paper

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thin will stand for these years,
a kind of scientific shorthand.

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Once I had a professor whose
wife was in every photo

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he took of rock formations.

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He'd click through slide
after slide saying,

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my wife for scale.

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Isn't there always a woman
in the picture and isn't she

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always small in comparison?

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Forgive me, that was
my grief talking.

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Tell me, how do I teach
myself to be alone?

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The strata for this age
will not be the first

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to reveal what
salt does to stone

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as if a sea had been here
and not sadness only.

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Tell me, with God
a question where

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is solace but in the Earth?

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The soil I'm standing
on in this moment,

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even as it shifts beneath my
feet as it gives and cannot

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hold me, will be rock.