WEBVTT

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I'm just going to
read three more poems.

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The next one has a rather
ghoulish sort of detail

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that perhaps needs a
little bit of explanation.

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In the 19th century,
the British excavated

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most of the mummies that
were entombed in Egypt

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in the Valley of the Kings.

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And you would think they would
have ended up in museums,

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but in fact, most
of those mummies

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were sold to a company in
Liverpool that made fertilizer.

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And it was a sales gimmick that
John Lennon's grandmother's

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yard had particles
of ground up mummies.

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And that's not one of the
main things in the poem,

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though I think you'll
understand where it's going.

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The title of the poem is,
"Xerox of a Photograph

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of Bergen-Belsen."

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Bergen-Belsen was one of
the concentration camps.

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For Henry Johnson.

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"Thereafter his lecture
on graves, yet these

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are not graves.

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His lecture on well-organized
hell, but this is neither hell,

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nor organized even to
form discernible shapes.

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A handout, we
reconstruct slowly,

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roil of body on
stacked body, and heads

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oddly floating to a surface
caught mid-scream and never

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like Orpheus.

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The classrooms waxed floor
glare, this ink, and image,

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recollection of the cameras
remembering abstract eye.

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But not I, nor the echoing
neural memory of I,

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nor the memory of the thumb
of George A. Rogers, Magnum

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Photographers Incorporated,
pressing down the button

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to release the lens to 16/100ths
of a second's glimpse of light.

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This room, midsummer
sun on rows of desks,

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the lake beyond,
and darkening sky.

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Event and evasion, end-link
in the causal chain, already

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the linkage mere and
neat, mere and neat.

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Bronze coins of the realm's
most distant provinces,

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raised profiles of
Trajan, or Alexander,

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distorted to less
than caricature.

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150,000 mummies from the valleys
near Luxor, human, cat, snake,

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and ibis, stacked on Nile
docks, and loaded on clippers,

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bound for Liverpool and ground
there for fertilizer, spices,

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aphrodisiacs for Chinese coolies
laying track in California

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for the driving of
the Golden Stake.

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A warehouse of hair,
a warehouse of shoes,

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the hotel terminus, Lyon.

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A German military doctor
injecting Jean Moulin with

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methamphetamine to wake
him for his final beating,

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personally administered by
Obersturmführer and former

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seminarian Klaus
Barbie, end link.

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The stifling room, the sister
of Anne Frank, end link.

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Limbs akimbo, patternless,
water scrolls in rain,

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end link, near and neat.

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A warehouse of scarves, of
ladies underthings, the window

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blistering with rain, the
big drops' cough and hiss,

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and gazes scarcely pausing on
these shades, these pages."

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