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I'll finish with the title
poem of my book, "Interior

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With Sudden Joy," which is the
title of a painting by Dorothea

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Tanning, who is 94
and still around doing

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great things like writing books
of poetry and making me laugh.

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"Interior With Sudden Joy."

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"To come into my room
is to strike strange.

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My plum velvet pillow and my
hussy spot, the only furniture.

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Red stripes around my
ankles, tight as sisters.

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We are maybe 14, priceless
with goose flesh.

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Our melon bellies, our
mouths of tar, us four.

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My mud-legged sister, my
bunched-up self, the dog,

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and the whirligig just
a prick on the eye.

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We are all sewn in together,
but the door is open.

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The book is open too.

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You must write in red like
Jesus and his friends.

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Be my other sister,
we'll share a mouth.

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We'll split the dress down the
middle, our home, our cesarean.

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When the bishop comes, he comes
diagonal, from the outside,

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and is a lie.

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He comes to bless
us all with cramps.

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Mole on the chin that he is.

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To bring us the red
something, a glow, a pumping.

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Knot softly a rub with
loincloth and linseed.

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More of a beating with
heart up the sleeve.

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He says the air in
here is tight and sore

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but punctured sudden
by a string quartet.

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We are.

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In these light-years,
we've rung a star.

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I am small for my age.

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Child of vixen wood, lover of
the color olive and its stain.

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I live to leave,
but I never either.

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One leg is so long
we can all walk it.

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Outside is 1,000 bitten
skins and civilization,

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its own murder of crows.

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I am ever stunned,
seduced whistle thin,

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and hot with home.

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Breathless with
mercury, columbine.

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Come, let us miss
another wintertime."

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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