WEBVTT

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Well, I'll say the obvious,
it's an enormous pleasure

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to be back here, extremely
strange in its way,

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familiar, alien,
and I'm nervous.

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Thank you, Alison,
for that introduction.

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Generous cruelty, was that
it, that I was practicing?

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Yes, that sounds like me.

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I'm going to read
first from Wise Poison.

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And I think basically
I'm going to read

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in a chronological order,
rather than jumping around.

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This one's called Self-Portrait.

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I live my life in ways entirely
forgotten or never even known

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by this hornet, this
dead since summer

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yellow jacket, its bronze husk
resting on the windowsill.

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A secret and clever
recklessness has always

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helped me, the sort
that, in 1953, drove

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a Hungarian recording engineer
to bootleg his favorite bebop

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in R & B. The outlawed tunes
were pressed on top of X-ray

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sheets, the X-rays stolen
from a Budapest hospital

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so a diamond tipped stylus could
glide the bluesy decrescendos,

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the riffs and splintered eighth
notes of jawbone and hip socket,

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songs from the year I was born,
a cunning that sounded something

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like my own.

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By the time I turned 20,
my birthday, the spring

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night, I shoved a friend's
VW van down an embankment

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and into the estuary.

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It was our plan to
cop her insurance

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and finance a trip to Mexico.

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After the splash, a rustling
in bayberry and cottonwood,

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lapping waves, mosquito silence.

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When she heard the
police sent down divers,

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searching for bodies, she cried.

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If after placing my hand on her
cheek and touching those tears,

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I'd raised my
fingers to my lips,

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their saltiness might
have humbled me.

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I didn't.

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I kept my own counsel, always
acting generous and satisfied,

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an impersonator of the helpful,
my plots and schemes disguised.

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The other hornet knows
how, the slyer one,

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the one who spotted a hole
in the screen and dared

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to squeeze through.

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He flew off to join the
next dance around a branch

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of overripe pears.

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He was a daydreamer
and easily distracted

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by a day-old smear of ketchup,
by sweat-dampened hair,

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dreaming of sailing downstream
on a chip of cedar bark,

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wings folded back, lost
but canny enough not

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to give the feeling a name.

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I'm available afterwards for
advice about insurance fraud,

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so please feel free.

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My rates are very cheap.

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