WEBVTT

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Thank you.

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It's great to be back in
the land of the aguas.

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The last time I was here, it
rained three days straight.

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The only other time
I was ever in Tucson,

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it rained three days straight.

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So I recognize it.

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I came with a raincoat.

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I was ready.

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I've been talking non-stop,
so I mean, talking a torrent.

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I've been causing it.

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Actually, Frost said that talk,
he did this water metaphor.

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He said, "talking was
a hydrant in the yard,

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and poetry was a faucet
in an upstairs room.

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Turning on the first takes
the pressure off the second."

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I'll shut up.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Some of these poems
are in voices.

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I wanted to read a couple of
poems in voices, partly just

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because of Oklahoma City today.

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These two acts of God were
voices that came over the radio.

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I tend not to listen
coherently to the radio,

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I think that's the
value of the radio.

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Television requires you to
actually go in and live there.

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Radio permits it to live in
you, somehow patches of it

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can come through.

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But as a result, I missed who
exactly these people were.

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And they spoke in very
characteristic ways,

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and I tried to, after they
spoke, tried to just catch

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patches of what they said.

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By and large, it's quoting.

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If you know who these guys are,
I will credit them from here

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on in.

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Much of this book actually owes
its language to other people.

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Acts of God--

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Tornado.

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"I said, the
people, come inside.

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They would be safe
in the building.

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So many of those people die.

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You can see my guilt.

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I could see hands,
to a lady, moving.

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I knew the lady.

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You can see my
guilt. Sometimes, I

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want to run to get away from it.

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I ask forgiveness,
night and day.

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I ask it from the cemetery.

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I can never dream
this storm away.

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It was over for maybe minutes,
and it was never over."

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This woman, the way she
spoke was extraordinary.

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I mean, it was clear
that she wasn't

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a native speaker of English.

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But she also had this way of
letting her unsettledness,

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a very fundamental
global unsettledness,

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from this storm enter
into her language somehow.

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And so, when she said, "I could
see hands, to a lady, moving."

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At first, I had thought
it was the rescue

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workers going toward her.

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But then she said,
"I knew the lady.

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You can see my guilt."

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And then you realize, she's the
one on the inside of the rubble.

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That it's hard because, at
the end, she said, you know,

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"It was over for maybe minutes,
and then it was never over."

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You realize that in many ways,
you can't tell the sufferers who

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survive apart from
the ones who don't.

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That the suffering is shared.

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And you feel tinges of that in
this guy's account of being hit

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by lightning, also, I think.

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"It pushed me backward.

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I could see my friends
go backward, too.

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As from a blast, but slowly.

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Very slowly, everything
was in a different time.

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It burned inside my body.

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I could feel my hands curl up.

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My pocket got on fire, I
didn't want to reach in there

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and take a handful of the hot.

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My money hurt.

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I'm different now, forever.

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Put that fact into your book.

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My hair used to be straight.

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My eyes, you see,
they're gray as ash.

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They used to be light blue.

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You live, if you're lucky.

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But take my word--

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it changes how you look."

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I read that once at
a community college,

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where people were required
to come to my reading.

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And they tried to add a
little extra incentive

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by holding it in a snack shop.

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[LAUGHTER]

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So, there was a double effect of
people who resented being there,

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and who also really wanted
to eat their hot dogs.

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So there were--
especially people

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in the back were like, it
was as though the wagons were

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drawn around the hot
dog fire or something.

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I saw a lot of backs.

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But at the very end, there
was this one shy girl who

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raised her hand at the
end of that poem, where,

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"you live if you're lucky.

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But take my word, it
changes how you look."

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And she said, "Do you
mean, look from the inside,

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or look from the outside?"

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She was so tentative
and so sweet.

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And I said, "Yes!"

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So happy!

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Stop your hot dogs, you others.

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I'm not sure she was
entirely satisfied either,

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I think she wanted an
unambiguous answer.

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But she was on the verge
of a great discovery.

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[LAUGHTER]

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