WEBVTT

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The next three poems are my way
of continuing the introduction.

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I want you to know me through
these three short pieces.

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The first is called
"Biographical."

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It's really autobiographical.

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I had an argument about
that with somebody

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in Becky Byrkit's
class recently.

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She said, well, if it's
autobiographical then

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you should say autobiographical.

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And she scared me.

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I didn't change it.

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[LAUGHTER]

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For some reason, fear wasn't a
good rhetorical tool that night.

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And the next one is called "The
Million Dollar Pet Sex in Fat

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City," and the next one, "The
Wounding We Call the Windy

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Forest."

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And I'm reading these
to you because I

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think they kind of characterize
the tenor and the tone of some

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of the interior voices that
I carry around with me,

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and I want you to
know about them.

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I think you should know
about these things.

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"Biographical."

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"So, the reports are in.

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If a person permits circumstance
to make of her a thing,

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she will suffer.

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Last night I talked to my lover
except she wasn't my lover.

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In the story she told, I was
a dear, dear rabbit almost no

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one would want to leave.

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There're just arrangements
one has to make sometimes

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that govern a life.

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Call it a sea change.

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The scene was the shore.

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I had climbed up on some
large rocks early on.

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From there I called
to everyone I knew.

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A bright line of vegetative
life lined the view hundreds

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of coastal days.

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Not nearly enough.

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From there I think it might
be possible to break out

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of the usual pattern
romantique and create

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a love which is not of the
paradigm the ancients describe.

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But then I would
like to think it

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is possible to be a
woman who sells melons

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beside a stream in the story
where the Buddha's teaching can

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be overcome.

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In the story I told, I had
the usual trouble with God.

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I was lying next to a small
woman in a bathing suit,

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containing a tremendous
fear that I would not

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be all right, that I
would not be loved again.

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That story starts
where some desert quail

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keep asking me to go back to the
dream in the middle distance.

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In it, my four sisters' faces
light up near some blasted

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rocks, and a sea bass
wants to walk out."