WEBVTT

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I'm going to read about
eight or nine poems.

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There are all a little
bit longer than normal.

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I'm not sure what normal is.

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A little bit longer.

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And they're all from
a new book titled

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Erosion, which is due out in
a few months from Princeton.

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I grew up in Italy and none
of the poems in my first book

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really have anything of
that country in them.

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I lived there until I was 17.

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Didn't really speak English
fluently until I was about 18.

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And I tried very hard
and in my new work

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to introduce myself
to a country which

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represents my parents' exile.

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And from which I have exiled
myself again by coming home.

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As you can see that the
term home is confusing.

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So this first poem
I wrote in effect

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as an introduction for
myself to this place,

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which is the Italian landscape.

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I use a painting in it
by Piero della Francesca,

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an Italian Renaissance painter.

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It's a painting of the Virgin
Mary about to go into labor.

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And she's unbuttoning her dress.

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And the attending angels
are about to close curtains

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and preclude us from
witnessing the birth of Christ.

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And I was very moved by
this painting so I used it.

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"In this blue light,
I can take you there.

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Snow having made me a world
of bone seen through to.

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This is my house.

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My section of Etruscan wall.

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My neighbor's lemon trees.

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And just below the lower
church the airplane factory.

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A rooster crows all day
from mist outside the walls.

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There's milk on the air.

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Ice on the oily lemon skins.

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How clean the mind is.

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Holy grave.

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It is this girl by Piero
della Francesca unbuttoning

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her blue dress, her mantle
of weather, to go into labor.

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Come, we can go in.

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It is before the birth of God.

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No one has risen yet.

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To the assembly.

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To the museums.

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Sorry.

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no one has risen yet.

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To the museums.

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To the assembly line.

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Bodies and wings.

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To the open air market.

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This is what the living do.

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Go in.

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It's a long way.

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And the dress keeps opening
from eternity to privacy.

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Quickening.

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Inside at the heart is tragedy.

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The present moment
forever stillborn.

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But going in, each breath
is a button coming undone,

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something terribly
nimble fingered

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finding all of the stops."

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