WEBVTT

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This is called Measuring
Things Close Up.

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My father ran away and joined
the circus when he was 14

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and I told somebody
that just the other day.

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It really reminded me, so I
decided to read this poem.

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First he had to water the
elephants and at that time

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he'd be carrying a lot
of buckets of water.

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And that's, with a
bunch of elephants,

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that is an awful lot
of buckets of water.

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And so he got promoted to
being the dog-faced boy

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in the sideshow.

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He was a very handsome guy.

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If I'd been half
that handsome my life

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would've been a great success.

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Then he became an acrobat, then
he quit and went back home.

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Came from a well-to-do
merchant family,

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but he was the black sheep
especially after he married

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my mother, who was a daughter
of a North Carolina sharecropper

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family.

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Wonderful woman and
wonderful with each other.

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Terrific.

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So the circus always had--

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I didn't know.

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I mean he'd take
me to the circus

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and he would go over and talk
to the clowns and other people,

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particularly one clown,
which I found out years later

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was Emmett Kelly,
the most famous.

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What did I know?

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But I would go to these
circuses with big tents out,

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the old tents, the
great canvas tents,

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like revival tents out on
the dirt, straw bus dust,

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set them up in the dawn.

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For some reason I
remember the first year

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that they had Hawaiian guitars.

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This wasn't the
Ringling Brothers,

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this was more like
a carnival circus.

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They drove me wild.

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Like I was talking
about Paradise.

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I could almost hear something.

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When I was a child I had
this thing about lightning

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was cracks in heaven and
if you're quick enough

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you could see into Paradise.

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I worked on that because
you have to train yourself,

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because you can't stop to think.

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It's like first for
lights on, if you ever

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played that game as a child.

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You have to do it
without thinking

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because there's not time
to see through into heaven.

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So you have to learn
it as an instinct.

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Still to this day occasionally
when lightning comes

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I'm not thinking so
I could look through.

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The Hawaiian guitars
was like I could almost

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hear the answer, what
I was looking for.

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I'd spend all day just
roaming or waiting,

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because I need money.

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I was a little kid, I
don't know, 14 maybe?

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In Pittsburgh that's young.

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Maybe here it's young, too.

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It's not young in New York.

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Then I would hear
the sound and I'd

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go running as fast as I could
over to this girly show,

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which is where they were.

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It's called Measuring
Things Close Up.

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This is a longer poem
and it starts out

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with the different elements.

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It starts out with
the elements of grease

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and I just came from teaching
in Alabama last year and stuff.

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And you'll forgive
me if the word

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nipples occurs in the poem,
but it's male nipples.

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So it's the strong man.

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In those days in the
sideshow one of the things

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was the man would put
hooks through his nipples

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and he would lift
great iron weights.

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Very impressive to a 14-year-old
kid who was not brave.

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Measuring Things Close Up.

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The world is announced by
oregano and thyme and sage

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and rock.

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This is the point that
you can hear a sound,

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you can see into
paradise and sometimes

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walking the mountains, where
I was living at the time,

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this poem was written.

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There was another island.

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I lived up on the
top of the mountain.

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And the oregano and
thyme and sage grow wild

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and the summers
are fiercely hot,

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like I guess here
sometimes, and everything

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is burned dry except
for the oleanders, which

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I see you have here.

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Which is silly in that
that kind of landscape,

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to see pink oleanders,
such a sentimental color.

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The world is announced that as
you kind of know that you're

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getting close to the world.

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The world is announced by
oregano and thyme and sage

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and rocky places high
up with white doves,

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higher than the blue sky
above them, where women's

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voices and the lemon trees
below and the bright sea far

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down under that, a discontinuous
exigence that is the world.

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Reading Paradise Lost in Alabama
and thinking of lingerie.

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For the boy in
Pittsburgh, the only year

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he was nine, prowling near the
rusty railroad yard where they

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put up tents and the man
lifted anvils with chains

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through his nipples.

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The boy is listening for
the Hawaiian guitars that

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make him shiver as he runs
across the new sawdust

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to see again two women on a
stage above his head, indolent

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and almost naked in the ordinary
daylight, reality stretching

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thin as he watched the painted
eyes brooding on what they

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contained, a thing he did not
understand but even then knew

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was on the other side
of flesh somehow.

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As the music was contained
in the mute guitars,

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while the grinning man told lies
about what was inside that tent

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for only $0.50.

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Now all these years later,
a door opens into somebody

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and we enter to
find a sound maybe

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like striking two
stones together

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in the mountain silence, or
the noise of buildings burning.

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The heart, in its plenty,
hammered by rain and the need

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and memories everywhere,
trap doors and tunnels,

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thunder and yelling inside me.

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Empty streets were abandoned.

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Taxis are not
listening to the lights

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turning from red to
green and then red again.

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Walking all night through
sleeping Paris, visiting

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the missing hotels
where I lived in my 20s,

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thinking how we get
into bed with God

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in order to participate
in that size

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and fail and yearn forever after
to fail that importantly again.

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