WEBVTT

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I was about to promise
I'm going to get happier,

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but I don't know that I am.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Because the next poem
I'm going to read--

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so today is the 11th anniversary
of my mother's death.

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And she's here.

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I kind of felt
her with me today.

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And there is a much
longer sequence

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in the book called The
Messengers that talks

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about my mother and that time.

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But this is a poem called
"Striding, Tracing,"

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and it's just about loss.

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"To open the body is
to turn like Orpheus

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and lose everything.

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When working with a
35-millimeter camera,

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You trust the film advance,
feel the long gap between moment

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and document felt
almost nowhere else now.

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A child learns the calendar
on a spool of paper,

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With pictures to mark the
day she swims or eats pizza.

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But only the body registers
how the season withdraws

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from her, leaf after leaf.

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This tinned out autumn
light refuses us

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like mountains at
certain elevations

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or an economic system.

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An old woman sits at a
table, with a white sheet

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draped over her head.

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In the dream I know she is dead.

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And I wake to the sound
of a street cleaner.

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In workshop I tell my
students to let the seams show

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We talk about limits and
failure, productive confusion.

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In life, I'm afraid.

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Today the physicists
say we might

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be living in a brain
around the event

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horizon of a collapsed
hyperdimensional star.

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The physicists say
higher reality,

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Say soon after the
beginning of time.

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Every house cradles its dead.

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In ours, men pull up
carpet and asbestos.

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Fine fibers spindle
in the lungs,

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a persistent melody,
a poetics of Monsanto

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that commodifies the seed.

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How do we feed our deaths,
enough to live proximate?

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A mirror above the head, a water
stridor against some surface,

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tension of breath.

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To lose the body is
to sail like Odysseus,

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Is to wait like Edward
Snowden for a country."

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