WEBVTT

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A little because we are not
catching your voice entirely.

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OK.

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Is that better?

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Yes.

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OK.

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Thanks.

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Next group of poems,
I would call them

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about love and politics.

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First poem is called Distance.

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It's about the way in which,
though distance is usually seen

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as something to be
overcome, it can also

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be something that allows you
space for the imagination

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to be exercised, a kind
of saving distance.

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The old man across
the courtyard,

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reading alone in
his window seat,

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looks like a real student
awed by the vision

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and honesty of a page.

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When over here, he might
look bored or lonely.

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If the woman at the
door this evening,

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who asked for my signature,
had knocked over there,

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she wouldn't have
looked as she did,

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hurried, merely, and
graying, and fat,

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with a son and daughter behind
her squabbling over a toy.

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Even here, had I
stood back far enough,

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her speech on the arms
race and covert wars

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would have sounded serious.

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Now that she's
passed from sight,

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with a long view her
neighbors refused to take,

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I try to imagine her in
the distance arriving home.

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By now, she's hanging the
three coats in the hall

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beside the landscapes
her children painted

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in school, which look
no brighter to her

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than the one she did
herself 30 years back,

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the same dragons
and swampy woods.

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She'll have to
stand back farther

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to imagine how the
paintings might

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look one day with their
dark hues brighter,

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their fears cast out.

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Whatever helps her
to see that far

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is a power I should
attend to more.

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I should think
about why it behaves

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this way, giving her yearnings
that the present can't satisfy,

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not even the present
silent world of the people

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across the courtyard, beyond the
endless arguments of last week

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that people over here
are still repeating.

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