WEBVTT

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We were talking at
dinner about ghosts,

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so I thought I'd read
a poem about a ghost.

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"Memorial Day"

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In field guides they
are always in repose:

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tiny female, olive gray,
so like the local birds,

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The male shiny black with
tail stripes, wing bars,

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shoulder coloration
such a vivid orange

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I might have recognized
him in the elm.

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But this close-- for days,
midday over and over,

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they sprang from the
nearest branch of the shrub,

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slinging themselves
at the glass,

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then hovering there with
so much apparent purpose

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my son said, why don't you open
the window and let them in?

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For a moment it was the
voice of clearest reason,

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and it must have been the
same for the early fishermen

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on the Klamath river after
the terrible dark winters

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of retribution, seeing the water
clot with fish and fish twist

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willingly into their nets,

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who thought the salmon
had been sent to feed

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them and their families.

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Hadn't they prayed steadily
and weren't the fish

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laboring upstream?

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Likewise my father's cousin
deep in the mud and confusion

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of the war heard a
woman's voice distinct

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as a mouth harp, his
dead wife's voice

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urging him out of
the foxhole, out

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of the path of the sudden German
shell that killed the others.

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And now two rare impatient
birds flying at me, erect,

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sun struck, treading the air,
their mouths propped open

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as if to speak, as if they
were not birds but messengers.

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But I am overrun
with signs and omens:

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the pair death has taken
swim up like motes in my eye.

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I find them everywhere I look.

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I put them there.

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It is a blindness.

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American redstart warblers.

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If they have meaning, maybe
they represent the living, not

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the dead.

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And I am meant to
understand death

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is locked behind the
glass that teases

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with our own reflections,
until the implicating sun moves

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to the southwest and the window
once again holds only shadow.

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It's been a week since
their last visitation.

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At the window, the
smudge of purple,

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those small rich
berries the buds made,

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has opened into the blossoms'
distinguishing pastel,

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a thicket of lilac.

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From time to time a catch
among the usual calls,

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a sequence of notes
not a warble at all,

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but abrupt chips of sound to
match the guide's approximating

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graph, which records,
though it cannot translate,

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what they say.

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[APPLAUSE]

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Gee, you're good listeners,
that's a long poem.

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