WEBVTT

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(Singing) I see the moon.
The moon sees me.

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The moon sees somebody that I don't see.

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God bless the moon, and God bless me.

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And God bless the somebody
that I don't see.

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If I get to heaven, before you do,

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I'll make a hole and pull you through.

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And I'll write your name on every star,

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and that way the world

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won't seem so far.

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The astronaut will not be at work today.

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He has called in sick.

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He has turned off his cell phone,
his laptop, his pager, his alarm clock.

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There is a fat yellow cat
asleep on his couch,

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raindrops against the window

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and not even the hint
of coffee in the kitchen air.

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Everybody is in a tizzy.

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The engineers on the 15th floor have
stopped working on their particle machine.

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The anti-gravity room is leaking,

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and even the freckled kid with glasses,

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whose only job is to take
out the trash, is nervous,

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fumbles the bag, spills
a banana peel and a paper cup.

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Nobody notices.

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They are too busy recalculating
what this all mean for lost time.

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How many galaxies
are we losing per second?

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How long before next rocket
can be launched?

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Somewhere an electron
flies off its energy cloud.

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A black hole has erupted.

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A mother finishes setting
the table for dinner.

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A Law & Order marathon is starting.

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The astronaut is asleep.

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He has forgotten to turn off his watch,

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which ticks, like a metal
pulse against his wrist.

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He does not hear it.

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He dreams of coral reefs and plankton.

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His fingers find
the pillowcase's sailing masts.

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He turns on his side,
opens his eyes at once.

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He thinks that scuba divers must have
the most wonderful job in the world.

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So much water to glide through!

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(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

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Thank you.

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When I was little, I could
not understand the concept

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that you could only live one life.

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I don't mean this metaphorically.

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I mean, I literally thought
that I was going to get to do

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everything there was to do

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and be everything there was to be.

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It was only a matter of time.

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And there was no limitation
based on age or gender

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or race or even appropriate time period.

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I was sure that I was going
to actually experience

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what it felt like to be a leader
of the civil rights movement

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or a ten-year old boy living
on a farm during the dust bowl

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or an emperor of the Tang
dynasty in China.

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My mom says that when people asked me

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what I wanted to be when I grew up,
my typical response was:

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princess-ballerina-astronaut.

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And what she doesn't understand
is that I wasn't trying to invent

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some combined super profession.

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I was listing things I thought
I was gonna get to be:

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a princess and a ballerina
and an astronaut.

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and I'm pretty sure the list
probably went on from there.

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I usually just got cut off.

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It was never a question
of if I was gonna get to do something

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so much of a question of when.

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And I was sure that if I was going
to do everything,

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that it probably meant I had
to move pretty quickly,

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because there was a lot
of stuff I needed to do.

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So my life was constantly
in a state of rushing.

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I was always scared
that I was falling behind.

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And since I grew up
in New York City, as far as I could tell,

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rushing was pretty normal.

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But, as I grew up, I had
this sinking realization,

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that I wasn't gonna get to live
any more than one life.

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I only knew what it felt like
to be a teenage girl

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in New York City,

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not a teenage boy in New Zealand,

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not a prom queen in Kansas.

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I only got to see through my lens.

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And it was around this time
that I became obsessed with stories,

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because it was through stories
that I was able to see

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through someone else's lens,
however briefly or imperfectly.

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And I started craving hearing
other people's experiences

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because I was so jealous
that there were entire lives

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that I was never gonna get to live,

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and I wanted to hear
about everything that I was missing.

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And by transitive property,

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I realized that some people
were never gonna get to experience

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what it felt like to be a teenage girl
in New York city.

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Which meant that they weren't gonna know

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what the subway ride
after your first kiss feels like,

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or how quiet it gets when its snows.

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And I wanted them to know,
I wanted to tell them.

NOTE Paragraph

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And this became the focus of my obsession.

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I busied myself telling stories
and sharing stories and collecting them.

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And it's not until recently

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that I realized that
I can't always rush poetry.

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In April for National Poetry Month,
there's this challenge

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that many poets in the poetry
community participate in,

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and its called the 30/30 Challenge.

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The idea is you write a new poem

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every single day
for the entire month of April.

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And last year, I tried it
for the first time

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and was thrilled by the efficiency
at which I was able to produce poetry.

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But at the end of the month, I looked
back at these 30 poems I had written

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and discovered that they were
all trying to tell the same story,

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it had just taken me 30 tries to figure
out the way that it wanted to be told.

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And I realized that this is probably true
of other stories on an even larger scale.

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I have stories that I have
tried to tell for years,

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rewriting and rewriting and constantly
searching for the right words.

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There's a French poet and essayist
by the name of Paul Valéry

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who said a poem is never
finished, it is only abandoned.

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And this terrifies me

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because it implies that I could keep
re-editing and rewriting forever

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and its up to me to decide
when a poem is finished

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and when I can walk away from it.

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And this goes directly against
my very obsessive nature

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to try to find the right answer
and the perfect words and the right form.

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And I use poetry in my life,

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as a way to help me navigate
and work through things.

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But just because I end the poem,
doesn't mean that I've solved

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what it was I was puzzling through.

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I like to revisit old poetry

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because it shows me exactly
where I was at that moment

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and what it was I was trying to navigate

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and the words that I chose to help me.

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Now, I have a story

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that I've been stumbling
over for years and years

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and I'm not sure if I've found
the perfect form,

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or whether this is just one attempt

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and I will try to rewrite it later
in search of a better way to tell it.

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But I do know that later, when I look back

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I will be able to know that
this is where I was at this moment

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and this is what I was trying to navigate,

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with these words, here,
in this room, with you.

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So --

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Smile.

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It didn't always work this way.

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There's a time you had
to get your hands dirty.

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When you were in the dark,
for most of it, fumbling was a given.

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If you needed more
contrast, more saturation,

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darker darks and brighter brights,

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they called it extended development.

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It meant you spent longer inhaling
chemicals, longer up to your wrist.

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It wasn't always easy.

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Grandpa Stewart was a Navy photographer.

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Young, red-faced
with his sleeves rolled up,

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fists of fingers like fat rolls of coins,

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he looked like Popeye
the sailor man come to life.

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Crooked smile, tuft of chest hair,

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he showed up to World War II,
with a smirk and a hobby.

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When they asked him if he knew
much about photography,

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he lied, learned to read
Europe like a map,

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upside down, from the height
of a fighter plane,

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camera snapping, eyelids flapping

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the darkest darks and brightest brights.

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He learned war like he could
read his way home.

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When other men returned,
they would put their weapons out to rest,

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but he brought the lenses
and the cameras home with him.

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Opened a shop, turned it
into a family affair.

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My father was born into this
world of black and white.

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His basketball hands learned
the tiny clicks and slides

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of lens into frame, film into camera,

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chemical into plastic bin.

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His father knew the equipment
but not the art.

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He knew the darks but not the brights.

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My father learned the magic,
spent his time following light.

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Once he traveled across the country
to follow a forest fire,

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hunted it with his camera for a week.

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"Follow the light," he said.

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"Follow the light."

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There are parts of me
I only recognize from photographs.

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The loft on Wooster Street
with the creaky hallways,

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the twelve-foot ceilings,
white walls and cold floors.

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This was my mother's home,
before she was mother.

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Before she was wife, she was artist.

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And the only two rooms in the house,

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with walls that reached
all the way up to the ceiling,

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and doors that opened and closed,

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were the bathroom and the darkroom.

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The darkroom she built herself,

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with custom-made stainless steel sinks,
an 8x10 bed enlarger

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that moved up and down
by a giant hand crank,

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a bank of color-balanced lights,

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a white glass wall for viewing prints,

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a drying rack that moved
in and out from the wall.

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My mother built herself a darkroom.

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Made it her home.

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Fell in love with a man
with basketball hands,

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with the way he looked at light.

NOTE Paragraph

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They got married. Had a baby.

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Moved to a house near a park.

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But they kept the loft on Wooster Street

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for birthday parties and treasure hunts.

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The baby tipped the grayscale,

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filled her parents' photo albums
with red balloons and yellow icing.

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The baby grew into a girl
without freckles,

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with a crooked smile,

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who didn’t understand why her friends
did not have darkrooms in their houses,

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who never saw her parents kiss,

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who never saw them hold hands.

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But one day, another baby showed up.

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This one with perfect straight
hair and bubble gum cheeks.

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They named him sweet potato.

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When he laughed, he laughed so loudly

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he scared the pigeons on the fire escape

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And the four of them lived
in that house near the park.

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The girl with no freckles,
the sweet potato boy,

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the basketball father and darkroom mother

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and they lit their candles
and said their prayers,

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and the corners of the photographs curled.

NOTE Paragraph

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One day, some towers fell.

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And the house near the park
became a house under ash, so they escaped

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in backpacks, on bicycles to darkrooms

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But the loft of Wooster Street
was built for an artist,

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not a family of pigeons,

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and walls that do not reach the ceiling
do not hold in the yelling

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and the man with basketball hands
put his weapons out to rest.

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He could not fight this war,
and no maps pointed home.

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His hands no longer fit his camera,

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no longer fit his wife's,

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no longer fit his body.

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The sweet potato boy mashed
his fists into his mouth

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until he had nothing more to say.

NOTE Paragraph

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So, the girl without freckles
went treasure hunting on her own.

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And on Wooster Street, in a building
with the creaky hallways

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and the loft with the 12-foot ceilings

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and the darkroom with too many sinks

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under the color-balanced lights,
she found a note,

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tacked to the wall with a thumb-tack,
left over from a time before towers,

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from the time before babies.

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And the note said: "A guy sure loves
the girl who works in the darkroom."

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It was a year before my father
picked up a camera again.

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His first time out, he followed
the Christmas lights,

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dotting their way through
New York City's trees,

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tiny dots of light, blinking out at him
from out of the darkest darks.

NOTE Paragraph

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A year later he traveled
across the country to follow a forest fire

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stayed for a week hunting
it with his camera,

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it was ravaging the West Coast

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eating 18-wheeler trucks in its stride.

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On the other side of the country,

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I went to class and wrote a poem
in the margins of my notebook.

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We have both learned the art of capture.

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Maybe we are learning
the art of embracing.

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Maybe we are learning
the art of letting go.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)