WEBVTT

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This next poem is called
"My Documentarian."

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And you know, it's kind of a lie
that we put one person's name

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on the title of a book.

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Books are the products of
conversations and ideas

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and other readings.

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And this poem was written
for one of my mentors

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who passed away a few years
ago, the poet C.D. Wright.

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And it also includes
reference to quipus,

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which are a recording device.

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They're pieces of
string that in which

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knots were tied in
by the Inca people

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as a kind of, some
folks have said,

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a kind of accounting system.

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Another mentor and poet and
friend and visual artist,

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Cecilia Vicuña, uses
them in her work.

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"My Documentarian."

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My documentarian tunes
herself to the few vowels

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mouthed by common sparrows,
the ticks and growls

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of systems around her.

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She holds her
landscapes up to light,

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like clicking
through a view-master

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to reinscribe relations between
the landscape and the eye.

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She grows over
soil she's tasted.

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She winds string
through her fingers,

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spools a circuit for grief.

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She quipus in lieu of
standard accounting practices,

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takes care to be noncompliant.

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She file folders,
fields forest and blur.

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Data falls like ash around her.

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She records, too, a hand on a
doorknob, light on the lawn.

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My documentarian pulls a
thread, knots unloosen in her.

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For years, no water
ran in the riverbed.

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Still, we called it river.

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She ponders these
betrayals, remembers

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the brain is built on
analogy, on smears and turns.

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A mail truck drives past her
house, and she feels her debts.

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My documentarian
tilts the page away

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from spreadsheet towards police
binders and microfiche, coffee

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and billboard prayers.

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Her archive scrolls, like
a time lapsed sunset,

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sings like a jar of breath.

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A tree in her yard throws
lines of sun barb and shade

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just to her porch steps.

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Her poems extend.

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