WEBVTT

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A poem called ''Palindrome."

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Palindrome is a saying or word
which reads the same backwards

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and forwards.

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And even though my poem
doesn't do that, it--

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I gave it the name
because it plays

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with the idea of two
opposite motions, of forward

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and the backward motion.

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In this case, about
the idea of there

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being an anti-world
in the universe.

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In which, everything
that happens here,

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is happening there
but in reverse order.

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So therefore, the she
in here, who is myself,

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has an alter ego in the other
world, who goes from her death

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to her birth.

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Somewhere now she takes off
the dress I am putting on.

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It is evening in the
antiworld where she lives.

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She is forty-five years away
from her death, the hole which

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spit her out into pain,
impossible at first, later

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easing, going, gone.

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She has unlearned much by now.

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Her skin is firming,
her memory sharpens,

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her hair has grown glossy.

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She sees without glasses,
she falls in love easily.

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Her husband has lost his
shuffle, they laugh together.

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Their money shrinks, but
their ardor increases.

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Soon her second child
will be young enough

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to fight its way into her body
and change its life to monkey,

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to frog, to tadpole, to cluster
of cells, to tiny island,

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to nothing.

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She is making a list.

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Things I will need in the past.

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Lipstick, shampoo, transistor
radio, Alice Cooper,

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acne cream, five-year
diary with a lock.

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She is eager, having heard
about adolescent love

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and the freedom of children.

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She wants to read
Crime and Punishment

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and ride on a roller coaster
without getting sick.

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I think of her as she will be at
fifteen, awkward, too serious.

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In the mirror I see she
uses her left hand to write,

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her other to open a jar.

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By now our lives
should have crossed.

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Somewhere sometime we must
have passed one another

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like going and coming
trains, with both

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of us looking the other way."

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That line, things I
will need in the past,

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was stolen from one
of our daughters.

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Who was then very young and
had just learned to write

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and but was mixed up
on concepts of time.

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And she made this list
of things she wanted

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to buy in the dime store.

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Which she had as, things
I will need in the past.

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