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Maybe I'll just read--

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actually, what I have next?

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Oh, I have some short poems.

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So I also wrote at some
point little tankas in here,

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and they were all at
the end of the book.

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And my friend said, you should
scatter them throughout.

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And so I did because
I actually started

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thinking how he said they
were all like written

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toward to children,
or my children.

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But also, I think the kind
of obsessive personality

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that I have was that, there are
so many of these obituaries,

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and they're so
heavy and they even

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look kind of clunky
in their shape,

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that these little tankas, which
are 5, 7, 5, 7, 7, I think,

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gave me, as a reader,
a little bit of break.

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So I put them in pairs.

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And so I'll just read these two.

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"Sometimes all I have are
words, and to write them

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means they are no longer
prayers, but are now animals.

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Other people can hunt them.

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You don't need a thing
from me, you already

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have everything you need.

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The moon, a wound on the lake,
our footprints to not follow."

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And in retrospect,
I think these poems,

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the poems in The Trees
Witness Everything,

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which are miniature
poems, really

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extended from these other tanka.

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So I started-- I think
I started back here,

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but I didn't know
it at the time.