WEBVTT

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This is a poem about
grammar, sort of.

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But it's in a section called
"Witnessing From Afar" which

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in this new book also
contains the more overtly

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political poems of this
volume, a few which

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I'm going to read now.

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"Mysterious Disappearance
of May's Past Perfect."

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"Even as the beach is
blackened again with oil,

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reporters tell us if the
ship had had a double hull,

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the spill may not have occurred.

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And now a poet, writing of one
who died some years ago, too

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young, recounts that had
she been and done otherwise

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than she was and did, it's
thought she may have survived.

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The poet does not agree, but
this impoverished grammar

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nonetheless places in
doubt an undeniable death.

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Is it collective fear
suppresses "might have,"

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fear that causes
do produce effects?

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Does may still trail with it,
misused, a comforting openness,

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illusion that what has
already happened after all

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can be revoked, reversed?

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Or in these years, when
from our mother tongue,

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some words were
carelessly tossed away,

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while others hastily were being
invented, chief among them,

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overkill, has the
other meaning swollen

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as never before of might,
thrust out of memory,

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its minor homonym so apt for
the precise nuance of elegy,

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for the hint of judgment,
reproachful clarities

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of tense and sense?"

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This particular
error is one which

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I seem to encounter virtually
every day somewhere nowadays,

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and it drives me up a wall.

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