WEBVTT

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Thank you, Dawn.

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I hope I still do
all that stuff.

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I think that press release
is a couple of years old.

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It's a huge pleasure to be here.

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Thank you so much to the
University of Arizona Poetry

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Center, and the staff for being
so fantastic and welcoming.

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It's a really
lovely organization.

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I'm going to read a few oldies.

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But I'm mostly going
to read new ones.

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And I going to start
with one about snow

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because there is none here,
and I was surrounded by it

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for a while before I came here.

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To pretend that
it's sort of winter,

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like it is other places.

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Not that I'm complaining,
I love this weather.

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"Why is the color of snow?

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Let's ask someone who
has no way of knowing,

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someone who can give us an
answer, another duplicity

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to help double the world.

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What kind of poetry is
all question anyway?

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Each question leads to
an ice burn, a snow nova,

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a single bed spinning in space.

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Poet, decide.

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I am lonely with questions.

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What is snow, what isn't?

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Do you see how it is for me?

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Melt yourself to
make yourself more

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clear for the next observer.

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I could barely see you anyway.

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A blizzard I understand better.

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The secrets of many
revealed as one,

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becoming another
on my only head.

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It's true that snow takes
on gold from sunset and red

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from rear lights, but
that's occasional.

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What is constant is white, or
is that only sight, a reflection

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of eye whites and light?

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Because snow
reflects only itself.

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Self upon self upon self is a
blanket used for smothering.

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For sleeping.

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For not seeing the
naked flawed body

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concealing it from the
lover, curious, ever curious,

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who won't stop looking.

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White for privacy.

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Millions of privacies
to bless us with snow.

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Don't we melt it?

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Aren't we human dark with
sugar hot to melt it?

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Anyway, the question.

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If a dream is a construction,
then what is a construction?

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If a bank of snow is
an obstruction, then

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what is a bank of snow?

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A winter vault of valuable
crystals convertible for

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use only by a Zen
sun laughing at us.

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Oh, materialists,
thinking matter matters.

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If we dream of snow,
of banks and blankets

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to keep our treasures
safe forever,

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what world is made that made us
that we keep making and making

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to replace the dreaming at last,
to stop the terrible dreaming?"

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