WEBVTT

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This poem, this next
poem is called Grace.

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And it's for Jim Welch, and
for my friend, Sterling Wind.

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And I wrote it, part of it on--

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I started on a plane
flying up to North Dakota

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this spring, flying
over Iowa City.

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And when I went to
school in Iowa City,

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it was two of the most
difficult years in my life.

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And I suppose somehow, I
was trying to find grace.

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I suppose I still am.

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Anyway, this poem
is called Grace.

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And Rabbit, like Coyote,
is trickster of my tribe.

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Grace.

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I think of Wind
in her wild ways,

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the year we had nothing to
lose and lost it anyway,

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in the cursed
country of the fox.

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We still talk about
that winter, how

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the cold froze imaginary buffalo
on the stuffed horizon of snow

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banks.

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The haunting voices of
the starved and mutilated

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broke fences, crashed
our thermostat dreams.

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And we couldn't stand
it one more time.

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So once again, we lost a winter
in stubborn memory, walked

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through cheap apartment walls,
skated through fields of ghosts

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into a town that never
wanted us, in the epic search

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for grace.

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Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we
could not contain our terror

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and clowned our way through
a season of false midnights.

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We had to swallow that
town with laughter,

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so it would go
down easy as honey.

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And one morning, as the
sun struggled to break ice,

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and our dreams had found
us with coffee and pancakes

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in a truck stop along
Highway 80, we found grace.

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I could say grace was a
woman with time on her hands,

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or a white buffalo
escaped from memory.

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But in that dingy light, it
was a promise of balance.

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We once again understood
the talk of animals,

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and spring was lean and
hungry with the hope

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of children and corn.

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I would like to
say, with grace, we

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picked ourselves up and
walked into the spring thaw.

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We didn't.

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The next season was worse.

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You went home to Leech
Lake to work for the tribe,

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and I went south.

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And Wind, I am still crazy.

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I know there is something
larger than the memory

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of a dispossessed people.

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We have seen it.

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I'm real proud.

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They just published
that in the Leech Lake--

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the newspaper at the
Leech Lake tribe.

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So--