WEBVTT

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So one of the
poets that I adore,

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as I adore many, many
poets, was W. S. Merwin, who

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was a great influence to me.

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And when he died, I
wrote two poems for him.

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And I read one of them at
Antigone's a week or two ago,

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and I'll read the
other one tonight.

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So I had the great
privilege of hosting him

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when he came here to read
in Tucson several times.

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And I even had one of the most
beautiful nights of my life,

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a dinner party for him and
Gerald Stern at my house.

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Unbelievable.

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This is from that night.

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It's called The Trowel.

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One day in the city, there
was someone on my porch

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who had never been there before.

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Someone who had written against
war and for rain in the trees.

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Someone who had
asked the Earth what

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it needed to
flourish after having

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been ripped raw the marketplace
for other ways of being.

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Someone had greeted
the loquat tree

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in my back yard with quiet
respect and admiration,

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as I had greeted him,
and the books that

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had become a terrarium for me.

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Little locusts of beauty to
counter the decay that seems

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so rank, but makes soil
capable of invention.

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I could say he was compost
to what I might hope to grow.

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After dinner, he saw
the trowel resting

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on the crimson
concrete of my porch.

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That's a good trowel, he said.

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The best trowel comes from,
and exacting as he was,

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he named the catalog.

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[LAUGHS]

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