WEBVTT

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When we first came
down here last summer--

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well, I said we had
gotten a house next door

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to our old friends,
Steve and Gail.

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Steve, who unlike me--

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I being satisfied to do
absolutely nothing most

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of the time--

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Steve is someone who needs to
be doing something all the time.

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So he had decided, without
knowing too much about how

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to go about doing
it, that he was

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going to enclose his back porch
and make a room out of it.

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And my health wasn't that good
at this point and I really

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wanted to get out
in the sunshine,

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which was then about 110
degrees, and work with him,

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but I didn't.

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I just looked from my window and
watched the walls slowly go up.

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This poem is about that.

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And it's about my arguments with
myself, I guess, about writing.

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"Tucson: A Poem about
Wood, for Steve Orlen.

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Jesus, the wind blew, hard, for
the first time in ten hot days

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tonight.

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We opened windows and doors.

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I tried to read.

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I wished my son,
three, was awake

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so we could have
perfectly talked.

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I don't start to talk or read
the way I start to write.

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My best friend, who I'm
gladdened to live alongside,

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and three young men are
enclosing his porch next door.

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Four upright beams atop, then
a window or space for it--

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wood.

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I would like to have helped
that fragile, gathering shape,

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especially to have hammered
the frame that will hold glass,

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but then I wouldn't have seen
it, or my friends, working.

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I write for something to do, so
I do it; it tells me how I am

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or it sometimes lies.

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I hate it, I do it for pleasure,
I'm not even part of it.

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Though it's something like a
frame and I see through it.

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I see you carrying on.

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I see the part of your labor
that must be your pleasure."

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