WEBVTT

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And sometimes, I try to think
about the great people I love.

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Walt Whitman being one of them.

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And Whitman seems to see such
a shine perishing Republic,

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Robinson Jeffers says in one
of the alternative versions

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of the national anthem.

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But lately, I've begun to think
that it's a great surprise to me

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that Pat Buchanan does not
carry the state of Arizona.

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I don't have this view.

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I love Whitman so much.

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But he seemed to feel
so good about people

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as though they were
primarily sexual.

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And it seems that
people would be fine

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if they were just sexual.

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They have to go and have ideas.

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And I'm one of them too.

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For a while, I lived
in North Alabama

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after I got out of
graduate school.

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And I really didn't
realize where I was living.

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And I was going
into town one day.

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And I saw this Ku
Klux Klan meeting.

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And it wasn't a small meeting.

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It suggested that
many of my neighbors

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perhaps were
members of the Klan.

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And I started thinking
about Whitman.

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And just in
relationship to this.

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I was feeling very depressed
about this I guess.

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Moment of Whitman.

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Coming down Sand Mountain, many
things moved with me in the car.

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Cosmic aphasia after a spat.

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A staticky Jonathan
Winters tape.

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The best of the Rolling Stones.

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And then I saw them
hatless, ungoverned,

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decamping from the church.

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A thread that flared the rope
and sprawled across the parking

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lot and nodded under trees.

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The bald and freshly permed.

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Many with dark coats and
red ties or matching purses

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and shoes.

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Innocuous farmers
with their retinues

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of fledgling weightlifters.

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Maiden aunts of
philosophy students.

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Ex coaches of insurance salesmen
and guidance counselors.

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Architects plotting
the aesthetics

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of Alabama Savings and Loans.

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Great flock-- femmes fatales,
trailing the mountainous sexual

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wonder of 16-year-old boys.

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Walt Whitman, snow jobber and
cataloger of American dreams.

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Demographer of miracles.

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There was just
that instant there.

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I boiled them in one
glimpse and thought

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they'd maybe caucused
for a wedding or a death.

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Or did they love
the Lord so much,

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they'd come on Sunday,
Wednesday, and now again

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on Friday afternoon.

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And some of these, too, I
guessed, had formed the mob

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I'd seen Saturday
two weeks before that

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looked so magisterial,
stentorian, Greek, as it

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uncoiled in a stark
festoon of white sheets

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and dunce's peaks towards
some vitriolic welder's speech

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against Earl Warren, Satan,
the communists, the niggers,

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and the Jews.

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Distinguish them singly
or mark them in the curve

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where they began to
blur and fade along

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the Piedmont of fescue,
anguses, and machines.

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Were these the faces you cheered
westward in numinous bodies

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yet unpublished in the
secret pages of the grass?

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Or does the flying vision always
fracture on closer inspection

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of the part?

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Another mile of farms, the
mountain sank to hills.

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A sorghum mill, a spotted mule.

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And then emblazoned on a barn,
a painting of a waterfall, where

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later I would stop
and grip the rail

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and watch the violent
white transfiguring

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stalk of water that seemed
to rear as it drove down

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and shattered on the
rocks and clarified

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beyond in many little
streams that muddled on

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and vanished in the trees.

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And just that way,
I thought that death

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might settle into things.

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And still, father of joy and
understanding, I did not leap.

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I stood there glowing under the
patient faces of the leaves.

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