Poet James Dickey speaks and reads from his poetry.

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American poet and novelist James Dickey was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966. He also received the Order of the South award.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) what I'd like to
(00:00:01) do here tonight is to read some some things from different periods of what I think I've been trying to do for the last 20 or 25 years some earlier things and which my style is completely different from what it is now and some some middle period ones and some new things that I've just done and I'll I just read ones that I think you you might respond to least. I hope you do one of them is about adolescence. I went to school in the country. And we had a little country High School up and down charge them and hey. It was called Crabapple High School. You don't believe there's a place called Crabapple Georgia with every lie is in fact when I played High School football is known as the Crabapple Cannonball. two members of the immediate family anyway But anyway, it's about one of those times in adolescence when when you become.
(00:01:19) Certain of something
(00:01:20) sudden become cognizant of some kind of strange Powers working within your body that you haven't had before. I mean, I don't mean to spell all this
(00:01:31) out. But
(00:01:34) but it's a book for most kind of a performance about courtship. I went with a girl named Doris Holbrook who was a cheerleader of the high school football team and and she was a little redheaded girl kind of a tough one, too. And my brother and I went into partnership and bought a motorcycle and I used to ride that to high school and then I would give her a ride back home on that some of the time but we had she lived in a kind of a terroristic situation with a father who was a great big redheaded fellow given to Violent outbursts of temper. He was said to have killed two or three men and I was scared to death. The ham and her mother was dead is I'm in London and they lived in this house back off on this Dirt Road off the main Highway and I would let her out there and her father didn't like me at all thought my intentions were not entirely pure. And in that he may have had a point. but she never could get away from him long enough for us to get together for any length of time until
(00:02:58) we discovered what was
(00:02:59) almost an ideal situation because up at the corner of this road where she lived on chair dog Road and the highway that was an old junkyard full of old wrecked stock cars and into Old all kind of Rex have those all over the South with Kudzu Vines growing all over him, you know, and it's just a Gruesome looking kind of a industrial graveyard covered with vegetation. But Doris would sometimes would be able to get away from my father and and bring a wrench and a crowbar and some other tools up to to the junkyard and get metal pieces off of the cars to sell for just bulk
(00:03:44) scrap.
(00:03:44) And now we saw our chance because when darkness would come up Cherry Log Road with a hammer and Chisel and wrench and pliers.
(00:03:55) I would come blasting in from the opposite direction on my Harley. And we would meet
(00:04:03) in the junkyard and we had a
(00:04:04) special car where we met. It was an old Pierce-Arrow. I don't know what that
(00:04:09) old old grandmotherly car was doing in a junk North Georgia junk yard full of wreck to stock cars. But there it was. I can remember to this day. It had a kind of a spacious back seat, which was the main thing as far as we're concerned, but it had a part of a glass panel. It was a Been in between the lady in the dryer that the lady who owned the car on partner in the driver and had little vase with flowers in it and all sorts of things. And and the first one of us to get to the junkyard would go in through various other cars and trying in between the the wrecks and through the foliage and the Kudzu Vines and so on and get to the car and would wait in the back seat for the other one to come and I Amber I was several times. I was the first one there and I remember sitting there and just as hot as the devil in there too, which seemed to belong to the occasion in some way and I'd hear the all kind of little creatures lived in the junkyard mice and snakes and turtles and all kind of things and rabbits and so on every time you hear something jumping around in the leaves and so on and scraping you think it was the other one coming and thing and also that it might be the father. And I always have since those days to these days. I've always equated that kind of anticipatory sexual excitement as having some kind of an element of danger in it. But anyways, I say it's the poem about adolescence and about though when the discovery of powers hitherto unsuspected in one's own body and a very peculiar way of Realizing those and an automobile graveyard and in North Georgia and in the 30s late 30s. This is called Cherry Log Road
(00:06:14) off Cherry Log Road and Oscar's me off Highway 106 that cherry Log Road. I ended the 34 Ford without who yields smothered in Kudzu with a seat pulled out to run corn
(00:06:27) whiskey down from the hills.
(00:06:30) And then from the other side crept into an Essex with a rumble seat of red leather and then out again aboard a blue Chevrolet releasing the rust from its other color reared up on three building blocks. None had the same body heat. I sat with him in changed with them inward toward the weedy heart of the junkyard for I knew that Doris Holbrook would escape from her father at
(00:06:53) noon
(00:06:55) and would come from the farm to seek Parts owned by the sun among the abandoned chassis sitting in each in turn as I did leaning forward as in a while stock car race in the parking lot of the Dead in that good. time after time I climbed in and out the other side like an Envoy or movie stars met at the station by crickets a radiator cap raised its head become a real toad or a king snake as I neared The Hub of the yard passing through many states many lives to reach some grandmother's long Pierce Arrow sending plateaus of blindness forth from its nickel hubcaps and It's tender upholstery on sleepy roaches the glass panel in between lady and colored driver not all the way broken out the back seat phone still on its hook I got in as though to exclaim. Let us go to the orphan Asylum John. I have some old toys for children who say their prayers. I popped with sweat as I thought I heard Doris Holbrook scrape like a mouse in the southern state son that was eating the paint and blisters from a hundred car tops. The hoods she was tapping like code loosening the screws carrying off headlights spark spark plugs bumpers cracked mirrors and gear knobs getting ready all ready to go back with something to show other than her lips new trembling. I would hold whom he soon soon where I sat in the ripped back seat talking over the end of phone praying for Doris Holbrook to come from a Father's Farm and to get back there with no trace of me on her face. To be seen by her redhead father who would change in the squalling Barn huh backs pale skin with a strop then lay for me and a Bootleggers roasting car with a string triggered 12-gauge shotgun to blast the breath from the are not cut by the jagged windshields through the Acres of wrecks. She came with a wrench in her hands through dust with a black snake dies of boredom and the beetle knows the compost.
(00:09:11) Is
(00:09:11) no more life. Someone outside would have seen the oldest cars door inexplicably clothes from within I held her and held her and held her convoyed at terrific speed by the stalled dreaming traffic around us. So the black snake stiff with in action curved back into life and hunted the mouse with deadly over-excitement The Beatles reclaim their field as we clung glued together with the hooks of the seat Springs working through to catch us red-handed amidst the gray breathless batting that burst from the seat at our backs. We left by separate doors into into the changed changed other bodies of cars. She down Cherry Log Road and I to my motorcycle parked like the soul of the junkyard restored a bicycle fleshed with power and tore off of Highway 106 continually. On the wind in my mouth ringing ringing The Handlebar for
(00:10:15) Speed wild to be wreckage forever.
(00:10:37) There's a poem that I don't think I've read for years that I'd like to read to you. I've read I wrote so many years ago that I would say. It's almost as though someone else wrote it. But it's a war poem. I read to about the war one of them. I was I was in night Fighters during the war and in a lull and the fighting and when they know you don't hear the sound of engines get it running up getting ready to take off and go off on a mission you get into your aircraft and get everything ready to go. And you're talking to the tower, but there are
(00:11:27) times when you just kind of sit there quietly
(00:11:30) with no lights on in the
(00:11:31) aircraft or anything and you somehow another you don't you don't want to break the Silence of sitting there. And then in the airplane, I'll turn the lights on. I'll see somebody else turns turn the cabin lights on his own and his aircraft and you just you just don't don't want to
(00:11:49) get into it. You know, you'll have to in a minute or two, but you just don't want it to be right
(00:11:54) then and you get that strange
(00:11:59) feeling that men always do in wars of of
(00:12:02) feeling why I what am I doing doing this that was never many of my any of my idea to do this
(00:12:08) and here I am at the septum getting ready to take this
(00:12:12) expensive airplane
(00:12:13) all off and go up and go off on a raid and kill people and perform paper patriotic actions of mayhem.
(00:12:20) And so on and you just get that Eerie strange feeling that you just kind of like a
(00:12:25) ghost but you don't want the engines to start and you don't above all you don't want to be the one to start on yourself and start the whole hellacious racket going again start the whole war
(00:12:39) going again. This is called the jewel.
(00:12:44) Forgetting I am alive the tent comes over me like grass and dangling. It's light on a thread turning the coffee urn green Where The Boys upon camp stools are sitting alone
(00:12:58) in late night.
(00:13:01) I see my coffee curving in a cup of blind steel to brimming smile. I hold up alive in my hand. I smiled back a smile. I was
(00:13:11) issued alone. late night
(00:13:16) a man doubled strangely in time. I am waiting to walk with a flashlight beam as a third week drifting leg to the aircraft standing in darkness alone
(00:13:29) in late night
(00:13:31) who packs himself into a cockpit suspended on clodhopping Wheels with the moon held still in the tail booms has taken his own vow of silence alone in late night. Across from him someone snaps on the faceted lights of a cabin there like the meaning of War he sees
(00:13:54) a poor
(00:13:55) strong Diamond of light alone in late night and inside it a man leaning forward in a helmet a mask of rubber in the balance of a great stressed Jewel going through his amazing procedures
(00:14:11) alone in late
(00:14:13) night. Truly do I live?
(00:14:18) Or
(00:14:18) shall I die at last of waiting? Why should the fear grow loud with the years of being the first to give in to the Matched Priceless glow of the
(00:14:31) engines alone in late night?
(00:14:43) Thank you very
(00:14:44) much. This is another wall poem about the same written about the same period of the war of the filter the Philippines campaign. You started your farm very strong friendships when you're in combat with other men, and I think this is especially true with with with aircrewman Flyers of various capacities in aircraft. My best friend was a fellow from out and Part of the country some way. I forgot exactly which state he came from but his name was Dawn Armstrong and he was a kind of a college-level gymnast and he could do lots of gymnastic tricks and things all sorts of amazing things with his body, but
(00:15:32) he was a little bit weak in
(00:15:33) the arms and the only weakness in his in his acrobatic routine was that his handstand was not very good all the The movements that you make from a handstand position, he was he lost points on those because it's he was not quite strong as he wanted to be in the arms. So when we weren't flying above we flew at night when we weren't I used to see Don all the time. I didn't the Squadron area working on his hand stand and he's his sense of
(00:16:02) balance. It's kind of odd for gymnastics sense of
(00:16:05) balance was not really very good either and he in the latter part of the Philippines. He crash-landed on an airstrip that the Japanese held and he and his Navigator were taken out and and we found later will behave tortured and beheaded by the Japanese and I years later. I wanted to write something about Don and commemorate his bravery and how much I thought of him and how much I loved him but nothing seemed to come right. I for once the man of words had no words to put down what he wanted to. Say
(00:16:45) and I thought well now Jim you must write
(00:16:46) this poem and it's necessary that you do.
(00:16:50) What is the main thing that you remember by Don
(00:16:53) aside from all those long and meaningless philosophical question arguments are used to have about the nature of existence and God death time art. Love all those things
(00:17:05) and I said to
(00:17:06) myself the main thing I remember about Don was his gymnastics in his working on his handstand and And
(00:17:14) just that about him and if that last time I ever saw him alive, I saw him at
(00:17:18) all. He was he was doing that and he took off that night and he was he crashed landed and the next day he was killed and this particularly horrible way by being
(00:17:29) beheaded and I thought if there was some way I could get all those
(00:17:32) memories in the actual facts of what happened to
(00:17:35) Don together into a poem than I would if I could find the
(00:17:39) form for it. I would have as much as I
(00:17:43) Personally could do to make my own peace with the situation that I could not bear harder to think about it all but when you write a you feel that these things are moral obligation. So I so this is what I wrote It's called the
(00:17:57) performance. The last time I saw Donald Armstrong, he was staggering oddly off into the sun going down
(00:18:06) of the Philippine Islands.
(00:18:07) I let my shovel fall and put that hand above my eyes and moved one some way to one side that his body might pass through the Sun and I saw how well he was not standing there on his hands on his spindle shanked forearms balanced unbalanced with his big feet looming and waving in the great untrustworthy are Flu in each night when it darkened. Dust fanned in scraped Puffs from the earth between his arms and blood turned his face inside out to demonstrate. It suppleness of
(00:18:43) veins as he perfected his role
(00:18:47) next day. He
(00:18:48) toppled his head off on an island beach to the
(00:18:51) South
(00:18:53) and the enemy's two-handed sword did not fall from anyone's hands at that miraculous site as the head rolled over upon its wide-eyed face and fell into the in I quit grave. He had dug for himself Under
(00:19:06) Pressure
(00:19:08) yet. I put my flat hand to my eyebrows month later to see him again in the sun when I learned how he died and imagined him there come judged before his small captors doing all his lean tricks to amaze them the back somersault to keep up and at last the stand on his hands perfect with his feet together his head down evenly breathing as the sun poured up from the sea and the headsman broke down in a blaze of Tears in that light of the thin Long human frame upside down in its own strange. Joy, and if some other one had not told him I would have cut off the feet instead of the head and if Armstrong had not presently risen in kingly round-shouldered attendance and then knelt down in himself beside his hacked. Littering grave having done
(00:20:07) all things in this life that he could.
(00:20:22) I remember one day a fellow came over from a little ways a couple of miles from where I lived. You came over for Sunday afternoon and just talking and wrap it around and play and he was a little bit older now eyes and and he gave me to understand that a man
(00:20:40) and a sheep can conceive
(00:20:43) progeny.
(00:20:47) And I said dick my really is that the truth.
(00:20:50) He said, oh, yeah, everybody knows that. Said in
(00:20:53) fact, I know this fella the knows this other
(00:20:57) guy. That knows it's there's other other guy. So the fellow that's that actually does know this guy.
(00:21:07) Who's who's been it in in this Museum in Atlanta? And way back in this little room will Dusty room way back in a corner somewhere. In this bottle of alcohol or something like that. There's this little thing. It's kind of like a little wooly, baby. And he's got his eyes open and you just can't you can't look at him and you can't not look at him.
(00:21:36) You know, it's just a little bitty thing cause you know, you know those things can't live. But he says I I said dig really is that true? He said oh, yeah, everybody knows that. I don't really know whether it is or not myself, but from that day to this, I don't think it is
(00:21:55) true, but it's still very disturbing image to me. You should have seen the faces in
(00:22:03) the audience and when I read this in New Zealand.
(00:22:10) Australia to
(00:22:15) but ladies and gentlemen, I certainly intend no blasphemy by this. It's actually a love poem of a very special kind. I
(00:22:24) think it's about the need for contact and warmth and and procreation and so on that runs through all
(00:22:34) of sentient nature and doesn't Acknowledge any kinds of boundaries of kind hourly. Sometimes it doesn't but it's the life force that flows through all living creatures.
(00:22:49) The first part of the
(00:22:50) poem is about the legend of the
(00:22:54) possibility of the existence of the sheep child in the museum the legend that
(00:23:01) farm boys build up to protect themselves from doing too much of this sort of thing. I don't know exactly what what too much would be but I'm not going to pursue
(00:23:12) that
(00:23:14) but the first part of the poem is concerned with the the building up in the minds of farm boys about the possibilities of the existence of in the Museum of the of the sheep child half human and half sheep what the latter part of the poem
(00:23:32) is supposed to be spoken by the Sheep child himself. from out of his bottle of formaldehyde in the museum now, I don't know what other defects overtures this poem may may possess but I think that it can hardly be faulted from the standpoint of a matter of the lack of imagination or originality of viewpoint at least in the latter section. Farm boys wild to coupled with anything with soft wooded trees with mounds of Earth mounds of pine straw will keep themselves off Animals by Legends of their own in the hay tunnel dark and dung of Barnes. They will say I have heard tell that in a museum in Atlanta. Way back in a corner somewhere. There's this thing that's only half sheep like a woolly baby pickled in alcohol because those things can't live. his eyes are open, but you can't stand to look I heard from somebody who but this is now almost all gone. The boys have taken their own true wives in the city. The Sheep are safe in the West Hills pasture. But we who were born there still are not sure. Are we because we remember Remembered in the terrible dust of museums merely with his eyes the Sheep child may be saying saying. I am here in my father's house. I who am half of your world came deeply to my mother in the long grass of the West pasture where she stood like Moonlight listening for foxes.
(00:25:40) It was
(00:25:40) something like love from another world that sees her from behind and she gave not lifting her head out of do without ever looking her best self to that great need turned loose. She dipped her face father into the chill of the earth and in a sound of sobbing
(00:25:59) of something stumbling away
(00:26:01) began as she must do to carry me. I woke dying in the Summer sun of the hillside with my eyes far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment the Great Grass Sea World from both sides man and
(00:26:20) beast in the round of their need
(00:26:23) and the hill wind stirred in my will my hope and my hand clasped each other. I ate my one meal of milk and died staring. From dark grass. I came straight to my father's house. Whose dust squirrels up in the halls for no reason when no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner and Through My Immortal Waters. I meet the sun's greens eye-to-eye and they fail at my closet of glass. Dead
(00:27:00) I'm most surely living
(00:27:01) in the minds of farm boys. I am he who drives them like wolves from the Hound bitch and calf and from the chased you in the wind. They go into the woods into Bean Fields. They go deep
(00:27:17) into that known right
(00:27:19) hands. Dreaming of me they grown. They wait. They suffer themselves. They marry they raise their
(00:27:32) kind.
(00:27:53) There's a
(00:27:54) couple of poems. I'd like to read you xcall to poems of going
(00:27:58) home. I've lived in most I think most
(00:28:03) people have lived in different places from the places in which they grew up some having but most have and it's always extraordinary experiment experience for me to to go home. Actually Atlanta and look at the house where I grew up and which is now no longer. There's just a space in the air now
(00:28:24) and I can remember whatever
(00:28:25) room was in the house and wherever trash basket was and everything and now there's it's just a there's nothing but space weather house that meant so much to me as it must have a child once
(00:28:39) stood but I always go back
(00:28:42) and look at where it was and Rumba little bit about it. It and my family my father and mother and brother and said brothers and sisters. And the first of the two poems of going home is called living
(00:28:55) there. The Keeper of the one who keeps the memory of the house the keeper is silent is living in the are not breathable of time it is gray winter in the in the woods where he lives they've been cut down you can see through what he is keeping what used to be a room in a house with one side turned to trees there are no woods. Now only other houses old self like a younger brother like a son
(00:29:30) we'd come rambling out of the house and
(00:29:32) wagons turn off the back driveway and bump it full bump speed down through the woods the branches flickering with us with the whole thing of home a blur gone rolling in leaves, but people are always coming to know Woods to know rooms in houses that have been Towing down. Where we live you and I my youth and my middle age where we live with our family miles away from home from my old home. I have rooms I keep but these old ones the ones where I grew up are in the air of winter. They are over other houses like ghosts the house lives only in my head while I look in the sun sinks through the floors that will hear the floors of time.
(00:30:21) It is a long way
(00:30:23) to the real house. I keep
(00:30:26) those rooms are growing intolerable in mines. I made
(00:30:29) up the all seems calm where I walk into them as though I belong there sleepers are stirring and arm Lies Over a face and the lights are burning in the fish tank.
(00:30:41) It is not like this, but it will be one day those Farms will rise and leave and age and come back and that house will Flame. Like this in the keepers head in with the last Sun it will be gone and someone will not be able to believe there is only nothing when his room was next to his father's blue-eyed blue-eyed the fix of the wagon Master blazing in death with life will not be able to look into Windows of the room when he saw for the first time his own blood. That room fills only with dying solar flame with only the backyard wind only the lack of trees of the screech owl. My mother always thought was a hurt dog and tell me for the Lord God's sake where are all our
(00:31:29) old dogs home.
(00:31:32) Which way is that is it this vacant lot these woven fences or is it hundreds of miles away where I am the keeper of rooms turning night and day into memory. Is it the place? Now live and die in the place I managed in is it with those people who never knew these people except for me those people sleeping eating my food loading their minds with love their rooms with what they love and must lose and cannot forget
(00:32:02) those fish tanks
(00:32:04) those James Bond posters those telescopes and microscopes and the hidden pictures of naked
(00:32:10) girls. Who are they and
(00:32:13) will they come foolishly back to stare at nothing? But
(00:32:16) Sunset where the blood flowed in the Wagon Wheel grew hole
(00:32:20) in the hands of the
(00:32:21) bald-headed father. Will they look into those rooms where now
(00:32:24) they sleep and see nothing but Moonlight nothing but everything far and long gone long gone. Why does The Keeper go blind with sunset the Mad weeping keeper who can't keep a goddamn thing? Who knows he can't keep everything. Anything alive none of his
(00:32:44) rooms his people his past his
(00:32:46) youth himself, but cannot let them
(00:32:49) die. Yes. I keep some of those people not in wagons, but in the all-night glimmer of fish in the secret
(00:32:57) glimmer of unfolding girls,
(00:33:00) I think I know I know them. Well, I call them for a little while Sons.
(00:33:16) Thank you.
(00:33:21) The second of the two
(00:33:23) poems of going home is called looking for the Buckhead boys bulkhead is a little town needs to be a little town north of Atlantis. Now, it's part of what the Chamber of Commerce prouder refers to as Greater Atlanta was that time it was a little kind of a pleasant little place that was out from Atlanta, but was not part of Atlanta, but now it is Is and part of my going home ritual besides looking at the place where I grew up is to go to Buckhead and see if any of the old boys that I played High School football with or ran on the track North Fulton high school and County high school track team with I still still have any of them are around because you have all these I have a kind of a personal illusion and if I can find one of the old Buckhead gang one of the Buckhead Boys around
(00:34:15) till around town. In the whole thing will be like it was and none of us. None of us will be middle-aged. None of us will be divorced. None of us will be dead in the war.
(00:34:25) None of us will be alcoholics.
(00:34:28) Some of them even in those days were fairly far along that road and they're probably among the dead or something worse. But anyway, I always go to Buckhead but I'll because I feel like if I could find
(00:34:43) one guy then
(00:34:45) all is not lost. The past
(00:34:47) is somehow redeemed some of the time going home. I go blind and can't find it the house. I lived in growing up and out. The doors of high school is torn down and cleared away for further development, but that does not stop me first in the heart of my blind spot are the Buckhead boys. If I can find them even one I'm home. And if I can find him catch him in or around Buckhead. I'll never die. It's likely my youth will walk inside me like a king. First of all going home. I must go to window and Roberts drugstore for driving through. I saw it shining renewed renewed and chromium. But still there is one of the places the Buckhead boys used to be
(00:35:34) before beer turn
(00:35:35) teenager. Tommy Nichols is not there. The drug store is full of women made of Cosmetics. Tommy. Nichols has never been in such a place. He was the number two man on the mile relay team in his
(00:35:49) day. What day my day well was I
(00:35:55) number three and they are some sunlit pictures in the Book of the Dead to prove it the 1939 North Fulton High School annual. Go down go down to Tyrese pool hall for there was more concentration of the spirit of the Buckhead Boys in there than anywhere else in the world. Do I want some shoes to walk all over Buckhead like a king. Nobody knows. Well, I can get them at Tyrese. It's a shoe store. Now,
(00:36:25) I could tell you where every spittoon ought to be standing
(00:36:28) Charlie Gates used to say one of these days. I'm going to get myself the reputation of being the bravest man in Buckhead. I'm going entire East toilet and pull down my pants and take a shit.
(00:36:41) Maybe
(00:36:42) maybe Charlie is the key the man who would say that would never leave
(00:36:46) Buckhead.
(00:36:49) Where is he may be out to look up some old Merchants. Why didn't I think of that before Lord Lord like a king
(00:36:56) Hardware hardware and Hardware Merchants never die. And they
(00:37:00) have everything on hand. There is to know somewhere in the wood screws. Mr. Hamby may have my prodigals crown on sale. He showed up for every football game at home or away in the hills of North Georgia.
(00:37:13) There. He is as old as ever. Mr. Hamby remember me? God Almighty
(00:37:20) ain't you the one who fumbled punt lost the Russell game?
(00:37:25) That's right how them Butterfingers.
(00:37:30) Still but I say still feminine, but what about the rest of the team? What about Charlie Gates? He's a boy at got lime in his eye from the goal line when y'all played,
(00:37:41) Gainesville. Right. I don't know
(00:37:45) seems to me I see see
(00:37:47) see what does Charlie
(00:37:50) Gates see in his eye burning with the goal lines. Does you see a middle-aged man from The Book of the Dead looking for him in Magic
(00:37:57) shoes from Tire. He's disappeared pool hall. Mr. Hamby. Mr. Hamby. Wow, where is ma? Not black? Paralyzed doctors can't do nothing. Where is Dick Shay? assistant sales manager of Kraft cheese How about Punchy Henderson died of a heart attack watching High School football in South Carolina? old punching the last of the
(00:38:28) wind sprinters and now for no reason the first of the heart
(00:38:32) attacks Holman Quigley,
(00:38:35) he's up at County Work Farm
(00:38:37) 16 doing. All right up that be out next year.
(00:38:43) Didn't anybody get to be a doctor or a lawyer? Sure, Bobby last has a chiropractor. He's right out hit Bolton got a real good
(00:38:50) business. Jack siple moved away Garden ham dead in the war.
(00:38:59) Oh The Book of the Dead and the dead bright sun on the page where the TEAM stands ready to explode in all directions with time. Did you say you see Charlie Gates every 9 in
(00:39:11) seems to me?
(00:39:13) well
(00:39:15) He may be at you wanted to golf station tween here in Sandy Springs. Let me go pull my car out of the parking lot and back of wind and Roberts.
(00:39:23) Do I need gas?
(00:39:25) No, let me drive around the block. Let me drive around Buckhead a few dozen times turning turning turning in my foreign car till the town spins whorls till the Chrome vanishes from wind and Roberts. The spittoons are remade from the Sun itself the dead Pages flood or the hearts rise up that lie in the ground and Bobby last us back breaking fingers pick up a cue stick. Tom and Nichols and Iraq the balls
(00:39:52) and Charlie Gates walks into Tyrese unimaginable toilet. I go north now and I can use 50 cents worth of gas. It is golf I pull in and praise the Lord Charlie Gates comes out his blue shirt
(00:40:09) dazzles like a Baton Pass. He Squints. He looks at me through the goal
(00:40:13) line Charlie Charlie.
(00:40:16) We have one away from we have one at home in the last minute. Can you see me you say what? I say. We're in God Almighty. Have you been all this time?
(00:40:26) I don't know Charlie. I don't know
(00:40:29) understand what I mean. When I say to the one man who came back alive
(00:40:33) from The Book of the Dead
(00:40:35) to the bravest man in
(00:40:37) Buckhead to the lime. I'd ghost
(00:40:40) blue wavering in the fumes of good Gulf
(00:40:42) gas fill ER up. With wine light
(00:40:48) heart attack blood the contents of Tyrese
(00:40:51) toilet the beer of teenage
(00:40:53) Sons. No
(00:40:55) just fill her up. fill ER up Charlie I'll do one more shot real shot. All right, this is from the Norwegian I guess appropriate for the
(00:41:21) occasion here. It's called a saw saying of
(00:41:24) farewell.
(00:41:29) Nothing is so painful. The Chinese say it one way one feeling I guess the Norwegians doing another. But it's all essentially the same feeling saying goodbye to someone and you want to turn away from saying goodbye to and say to yourself.
(00:41:47) Well, it's over the heart dies the heart gets. Well, I'll recover from this but you know, it's not going to happen. a saying a farewell You dressed yourself. So white for it. And you Poise is on the edge of an undersea Cliff for departure. We two are the only ones who know that this lost instant is not lost but is the end of life. It's as though we were dying this calm evening. We could say that
(00:42:22) but no other could
(00:42:24) in spite of this death. This death will stay with us. The
(00:42:30) deepest of all wounds has closed
(00:42:32) over and the Heart sleeps, but does it? We're fooling ourselves face it squarely there is no worse pain than to think that it does.