WEBVTT

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I'll read one other
poem from The Vixen.

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It's a poem addressed to
the vixen, called "Vixen."

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When I had the book all
together and friends ask me

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what I was going to call
it, I said "The Vixen."

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And people were almost
unanimously shocked at the idea

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that one would have
a title like that.

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They assumed that it must be a
symbolic, vindictive act, been

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some unhappy love affair
or something like that.

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But the vixen is a female fox.

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And you have to see
her as a female fox

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before you start thinking
whether she means anything

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else or not.

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"Vixen"-- "Cognitive stillness,
princess of what is over.

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High note held without
trembling, without voice,

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without sound, aura of complete
darkness, keeper of those

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kept secrets, of the destroyed
stories, the escaped dreams,

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the sentences never
caught in words,

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warden of where the river
went, touch of its surface,

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symbol of the extinguished,
window onto the hidden place

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and the other time.

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At the foot of the wall by the
road, patient without waiting

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in the full moonlight of autumn
at the hour when I was born,

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you no longer go out like
a flame at the sight of me.

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You are still warmer than the
moonlight gleaming on you.

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Even now you are
unharmed, even now perfect

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as you have always been.

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Now when your light paws are
running on the breathless

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night, on the bridge with
one end, I remember you.

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When I have heard you the soles
of my feet have made answer.

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When I have seen you, I winked
and slipped from the calendars,

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from the creeds of difference
and the contradictions that

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were my life, and all the
crumbling fabrications

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as long as it lasted, until
something that we were

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had ended.

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When you are no
longer anything, let

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me catch sight of you
again going over the wall.

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And before the garden
is extinct and the woods

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are figures guttering
on a screen,

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let my words find their
own places in the silence

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after the animals."

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