WEBVTT

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This is a poem called "Arkansas
Traveler," and is basically--

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or it started out to be
about my great-grandfather.

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And then, like all my
poems, it ended up about

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and my grandmother,
who I was very fond of,

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who was his daughter.

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My great-grandfather
left Bohemia in 1856

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to get out of the
Austro-Hungarian War,

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and ended up in Arkansas.

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And four years later,
got in another war

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in 1860, as you can imagine.

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And I think that's mostly--

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then he ended up in a prison
camp for a couple of years

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and then went back
to Little Rock.

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There are some quotes
from family letters,

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which I feel compelled to go
like this for, but I won't.

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But I hope you can tell
when the quotes come.

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If you can't, tough luck.

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I don't know.

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I don't know what to say.

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I can go like this, but I won't.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Why do I say these things?

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"Arkansas Traveler."

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On the far side of the
water, high on a sandbar,

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grandfathers are lolling
above the Arkansas River--

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guitars in their laps,
cloth caps like Cagney

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down over their eyes.

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A woman is strumming a banjo.

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Another adjusts her bowtie
and boiled shirtwaist.

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And in the half light, the
frogs begin from their sleep

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to ascend into darkness.

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Vespers recalibrate through the
underbrush, the insect choir

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offering its clear soprano
out of the vaulted gum trees,

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into the stained
glass of the sky.

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Almost 95 years to the day I
saw Ellison Smith passed out

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on the back seat
of an Oldsmobile 88

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in the spring of 1952,
in Biltmore Forest, North

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Carolina, who then rose up
from the dark of his 16th year

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and said to the
nothingness, "Where are we?

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Who's driving this
goddamn thing?"

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My great-grandfather
stepped off the boat

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from the archduchy
of Upper Austria

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and headed north
to the territory,

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and into another war here,
just past the Mississippi,

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on the Arkansas.

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I don't know that it was such
a great blessing sending us

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to Arkansas, but it was
so regarded at the time,

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and we're grateful
to General Jackson.

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Still, don't let me die as
grandmother did, suddenly

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on a steamboat stuck
fast on a sandbar,

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unable to get to Little Rock.

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And it was four years
later, a volunteer

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captain in the Confederacy, and
took a Minie ball in his palate

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at Chickamauga he carried
there until his death

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almost half a
century afterwards,

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and wrote a poem back to
the widow of one of his men

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about a sure return,
"where a life is not

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a breath, nor life's affections,
transient fire in heaven's

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light."

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He was captured again
and wounded again,

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confined for two years
at Rock Island Prison,

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and came back to Little
Rock and began his career,

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and died at 66--

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a ticket to Cuba stored
flat in his jacket pocket.

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When Jesus walked
on the night grass,

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they say not even
the dew trembled.

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Such intricate
catechisms of desire--

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such golden cars down the
wrong side of the sky.

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Each summer in Little
Rock, like a monk

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in his cell saying the
lesson over and over until it

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is shining, all day I'd
prove up my childhood

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till lights out snapped
on the fireflies who

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floated like miniature jellyfish
off the reefs of the sleeping

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porch, whose jasmine and rose
scented air broke over me

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back and forth before I
could count the half of them,

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and settled me under.

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This was before I was 10.

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That year my grandfather-- my
look alike on the sandbar--

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died, the war ended, and nothing
was ever the same way again.

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His mantelpiece clock sits
on my dresser now, still

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gilded and 19th century.

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Devotion, remember,
is what counts.

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Without it, you're exiled,
twisted, and small.

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The next morning we play golf,
four holes on the back side,

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trailing our footprints like
paired bodies emptied and left

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out to dry in the
web of sunlight

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and wet grass behind us
over the clipped fairways.

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My grandmother and I, up
before anyone else each day

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I was there.

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The sun, already a huge
hot thumb at 7 o'clock

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on our bare heads.

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Later, its print still warm on
my forehead, sunset like carrot

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juice down the left
pane of the sky

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into the indeterminacy
of somewhere else.

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I'd roll the
tarpaulin down and up

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on the sleeping porch,
the frog shrill and insect

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shrill threading out of
the bushes as palpable

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as a heart string, whatever
that was back then.

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Always in memory.

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To speak of the dead is
to make them live again.

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We invent what we need.

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Knot by knot, I untie
myself from the past

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and let it rise away
from me like a balloon.

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What a small thing it becomes.

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What a bright tweak at
the vanishing point--

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blue on blue.

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