WEBVTT

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This next poem is
from Badlands again,

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and it involves an
encounter with someone

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who was almost stopped in time.

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And the encounter takes
place before Bernini's statue

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of St. Theresa, which is a very
Rococo statue, the marble folds.

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And she's portrayed
there at the very moment

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of her transcendent
vision, and there's

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a sort of interesting
encounter with this girl who

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is mentally stopped in time,
and this beautiful statue that

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is also stopped in time.

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And the statue is called
Saint Theresa in Ecstasy,

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and the poem is
called "The Ecstasy."

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"As if bone spilled down the
stairway of a long night,

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her marble dress unfolded
the seven sevens of light.

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We had come to see the saint.

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And on a weekday, only a few of
the penitent in the back pews

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kneeled, old women
with the blue of sin

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already seeing
through their hands.

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It was the arrow through the
heart, the 100 butterflies

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pinned by one pin,
the moment that

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was always woman in the stone.

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I'd come with the girl who
saved her butter from lunch

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to eat later on the train,
who talked to her Jesus

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in her sleep.

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She was 25, and no man had
ever loved her, ever would.

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She stood transfixed,
as if the place is white

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where joy is, and then began
to giggle, pointing low,

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where a skeleton lay in
gold and lilac vestments

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behind the glass, its hair the
doll of hemp against the pillow.

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"Look," she said,
"look at the doll."

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I saw the face of the dead.

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Face with the devil's bear
had sucked all the honey

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from the comb.

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Yet as this was, after all, a
church, and we were strangers,

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and this was Italy,
bright summer,

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I touched the girl, felt
the quiver of her shoulder.

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And it almost took, like a
laughter from the next world,

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or that sadness in
sex, until she turned,

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one iris more astonished
than the other,

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as if the right eye
were always far away,

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and age another country,
and like the blue that is

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a pomegranate in its dreams."

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I was also beat up outside
that church by an old lady.

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In Italy if you don't have
your shoulders covered,

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and you look like you're
going to go into a church,

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they don't like
that, so some lady

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came out and started
beating the shit out of me.

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I was like, sorry.

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You slut.

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