WEBVTT

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I was talking about dictionaries
today in this class I visited

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and this poem is called "My
Grandmother's Dictionary."

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[CHUCKLES] I'll tell you
the truth about this poem,

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which is that I was reading--

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I don't like to spend
time on social media,

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I'm going to confess.

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It's not my favorite thing.

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I know.

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But I was looking on Twitter
and there was some editor who--

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a poetry editor who posted
this thing that says,

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I'm so sick of poems about
people's grandmothers

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and where they look up the Latin
and Greek meanings of things

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in dictionaries.

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And I was like, [CLICKS]
I shall write that poem.

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And so this is that poem
deliberately designed.

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It's called "My
Grandmother's Dictionary."

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It must have arrived in
the hands of a salesman

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Whose name shall
remain unrecorded.

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Let's call him the
handsome stranger.

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She saw him through the
little window next to the door

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and knew,

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Although she did not believe
she believed in such things,

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She had loved him
in a former life.

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She gave him a glass of her
legendary tea and let him go.

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My grandfather was upstairs
in the immaculate attic,

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Where after they died,

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I found this typewriter
sleeping among old blueprints.

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During the war he
diagrammed routes

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So trucks of soldiers could
arrive precisely in time

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to wait for their orders.

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Or he worked in parts,

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I don't remember.

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I can only picture
that afternoon,

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He told me exactly
who he had been.

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I hear the resigned tone
but not what he said.

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I was, as is my nature,
staring out the kitchen window,

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Thinking some great hypothesis
that could easily be disproved.

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That day now lost in the book

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No one can ever turn
around and read.

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This was in a little
town that was a harbor.

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Its restaurant, a windmill
replica turning in no wind.

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We never asked
her why she always

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stood in the darkest
part of any room.

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Once she looked up from her
eternal soup long enough

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to say to me,

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You really must remove
that terrible beard.

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What is the name of
that sort of love?

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I want to look it up.

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I think it comes from the Latin
for not knowing the Greek.

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For the particular
quiet of that afternoon,

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I finally gave in and picked
up the forbidden ceramic lion

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from the shelf.

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It slipped from my hands
that already trembled

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As they do today,

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And hit the very thick
carpet with a silent thud,

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Exploding into so
many tiny pieces.

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Out of the kitchen
she came with a broom,

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And we both pretended
it was never there.

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What is that sort of love?

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The dictionary knows.

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I opened it and found dust.

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I remember it had
a solitary gold

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stripe across blue-gray fabric,

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Like a dress you wear
only once by the sea.

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