WEBVTT

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That poem, "Sympathétique,"
and this next one

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take us-- their settings
are American Midwest.

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This mentions in the first
line the Italian-American film

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director Francis Ford Coppola.

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Perhaps you know his work.

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"Sycamore Mall."

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"Coppola's Cotton Club starts
at Campus 2 Cinema Saturday,

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6:45 mall-time.

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The Negroes in the
film are played

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by Blacks playing opposite
the tennis shop, tobacconist,

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lingerie, and antennae
sales, glass-cased elevator,

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and automatic bank
teller, because this

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is a strangeness
tendered in others,

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a display of the humiliated
and recast human being, a thing

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Michelangelo captured
in marble with David

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and its oversized right hand.

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Because this is a tenderness
strange in others,

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I dined formally in a towel
with daylilies and hydrangeas

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on the table, fresh
raspberries and roses

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in their second bloom, and
then sympathetically go

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out on the town.

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Symptomatically, it is
as if I am approaching

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the Doge's Palace in Venice, and
the Piazza is covered with ice.

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I exit my hotel on the Grand
Canal, Paganelli's, and slide

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arm in arm with my lover.

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It was right to act
back then in summer

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as if I were living
a love story that

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would be simple with its
curious, nocturnal glow,

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not unlike the
mall hybrid light,

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where, like the
single thought, there

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persisted an electronic chant
on the portable tape player,

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as from the bowel
of the basilica

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the choir repeats a benediction.

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No one ever touches himself
in public, our Lord,

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because we've all rubbed
off on one another so much,

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we're invisible.

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And that is what has become
of the tree for which our mall

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received its name,
with hope that it won't

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be the end of the century
for those who still live

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by the spirit of an act on a
street prepped like a movie

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set.

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It was right to act
back then and to trust

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the movement of the
affair to the relationship

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and insist on perfection.

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It'll be a while before
we are hoisted and joined

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as characters on a
screen in sepia tone,

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for a theater inside a
mall under the influence

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of temperature control.

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Painfully, one day we
wake and haven't the right

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clothes for Venice.

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It has snowed as it did, we
are told, once a lifetime ago.

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The full evening moon
floods the Piazza.

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And in the morning, workers
haul benches for the tourists

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to pass over.

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A simple pair from a painting
or the marble hair of the David,

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bandages art places
over our eyes,

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survive in Renaissance books
next to the Jog and Diet shelf.

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Michelangelo and Giotto appear
naked to the touch, holier,

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because no one is fully
conscious, nor ever able

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to forget anything, under
the false light of the dome,

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our ladies of the air
conditioner, the air freshener,

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the night moisturizer.

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Between summer and
winter of a given year,

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I reflected on life to no end
and fell in love, ourselves

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in a lover, like art,
whose strangeness

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tenders a body in others."

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