How many lives can you live?

I see the moon.

The moon sees me.

The moon sees somebody

that I don't see.

God bless the moon,

and God bless me.

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

If I get to heaven

before you do,

I'll make a hole

and pull you through.

And I'll write your name

on every star.

And that way the world

won't seem so far.

The astronaut will not be at work today.

He has called in sick.

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

There is a fat yellow cat
asleep on his couch,

raindrops against the window

and not even the hint coffee
in the kitchen air.

Everybody is in a tizzy.

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

The anti-gravity room is leaking,
and even the freckled kid with glasses,

whose only job it is to take out the trash
is nervous, fumbles the bag,

spills the banana peel and a paper cup.
Nobody notices.

They are too busy re-calculating
what this will mean for lost time.

How many galaxies
are we losing per second?

How long before the next rocket
can be launched?

Somewhere an electron
flies off its energy cloud.

A black hole has erupted.

A mother finishes setting
the table for dinner.

A "Law and Order" marathon is starting.
The astronaut is asleep.

He has forgotten to turn off his watch
which ticks like a metal pulse

against his wrist.
He does not hear it.

He dreams of coral reefs and plankton.

His fingers find the pillow cases,
sailing masts.

He turns on his side, opens his eyes once.

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

so much water to glide through.

Thank you.

When I was little,

I could not understand the concept
that you could only live one life.

And I don't mean this metaphorically --

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

everything there was to do
and be everything there was to be.

It was only a matter of time.

And there was no limitation

based on age or gender or race
or even appropriate time period.

I was sure that I was
actually going to experience

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

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

or an emperor
of the Tang dynasty in China.

My mom says that when people asked me
what I wanted to be when I grew up,

my typical response was
princess, ballerina, astronaut,

and what she doesn't understand is that

I wasn't trying to invent
some combined super-profession.

I was listing things I thought
I was going to get to be,

a princess and a ballerina
and an astronaut.

And I'm pretty sure the list
probably went on from there --

I usually just got cut off.

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

so much as a question of when.

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

that it probably meant
that I had to move pretty quickly

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

So my life was constantly
in a state of rushing.

I was always scared
that I was falling behind,

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

rushing was pretty normal.

But as I grew up,
I had this sinking realization

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

I only knew what it felt like
to be a teenaged girl in New York City,

not a teenage boy in New Zealand,
not a prom queen in Kansas.

I only got to see through my lens,
and it was around this time

I became obsessed with stories
because it was through stories

that I was able to see
through someone else's lens,

however briefly or imperfectly.

And I started craving
hearing other people's experiences

because I was so jealous
that there were entire lives

that I was never going to get to live

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

And by the transitive property,

I realized that some people were never
going to get to experience

what it felt like to be a teenage girl
in New York City --

which meant that
they weren't going to know

what the subway ride
after your first kiss feels like

or how quiet it gets when it snows,
and I wanted them to know.

I wanted to tell them,
and this became the focus of my obsession.

I busied myself telling stories
and sharing stories and collecting them

and it's not until recently that I realized
that I can't always rush poetry.

In April, the National Poetry Month,

there's this challenge that many poets
in the poetry community participate in.

And it's called the 30/30 challenge.

And the idea is, you write a new poem

every single day
for the entire month of April

and last year,
I tried it for the first time

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

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

that I had written and discovered that

they were all trying to tell
the same story,

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

And I realized that
this is probably true of other stories

on an even larger scale.

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

re-writing and re-writing,
constantly searching for the right words.

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

a poem is never finished,
it is only abandoned,

and this terrifies me because it implies

that I could keep re-editing
and re-writing forever

and it's up to me to decide
when a poem's finished

and when I can walk away from it.

And this goes directly against
my very obsessive nature

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

And I use poetry in my life

as a way to help me navigate
and work through things

but just because I end a poem
doesn't mean that I've solved

what it was I was puzzling through.

I like to re-visit old poetry
because it shows me exactly

where I was at that moment.

What it was I was trying to navigate
and the words that I chose to help me.

Now I have a story

that I've been stumbling over
for years and years,

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

or whether this is just one attempt,
and I will try to re-write it later

in search of a better way to tell it.
But I do know that later when I look back,

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

And this is what I was trying to navigate,
these words, here in this room, with you.

So, smile

It didn't always work this way.

There was a time
when you had to get your hands dirty.

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

If you needed more contrast,
more saturation,

darker darks and brighter brights,
they called it extended development.

Meant you spent longer inhaling chemicals.
Longer up to your wrists.

It wasn't always easy.
Grandpa Stuart was a navy photographer.

Young, red-faced with sleeves rolled up,
fists of fingers like fat rolls of coins,

he looked like
Popeye the Sailor Man, come to life.

Crooked smile, tuft of chest hair,

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

When they asked him
if he knew much about photography,

he lied, learned to read Europe like a map

upside down,
from the height of a fighter plane,

camera snapping, eyelids flapping,
the darkest darks and brightest brights,

he learned war
like he could read his way home.

When other men returned,
they put their weapons out to rust,

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

opened a shop,
turned it into a family affair.

My father was born into this world,
a black and white.

His basketball hands
learned the tiny clicks and slides

of lens into frame, film into camera,
chemical into plastic bin,

his father knew the equipment
but not the art.

He knew the darks but not the brights.

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

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

hunted with his camera for a week.

Follow the light, he said.
Follow the light.

There are parts of me
I only recognize from photographs:

the loft on Wooster Street
with the creaky hallways,

the 12-foot ceilings,
white walls and cold floors.

This was my mother's home

before she was mother,
before she was wife, she was artist.

And the only two rooms in the house

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

and doors that opened and closed
were the bathroom and the darkroom.

The darkroom she built herself
with custom-made stainless steel sinks,

an 8x10 bed enlarger that moved
up and down by a giant hand crank.

A bank of color balanced lights,
a white glass wall for viewing prints,

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

My mother built herself a dark room.
Made it her home.

Fell in love with a man
with basketball hands,

with the way he looked at light.

They got married, had a baby,
moved to a house near a park

but they kept the loft on Wooster Street
for birthday parties and treasure hunts.

The baby tipped the gray scale,

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

The baby grew into a girl without freckles,
with a crooked smile,

who didn't understand why her friends
did not have dark rooms in their houses,

who never saw her parents kiss.
Who never saw them hold hands.

But one day another baby showed up,
this one with perfect, straight hair

and bubble gum cheeks,
they named him Sweet Potato

and when he laughed,
he laughed so loudly,

he scared the pigeons on the fire escape.

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

the girl with no freckles,
the Sweet Potato boy,

the basketball father and darkroom mother.

And they lit their candles
and said their prayers

and the corners of the photographs curled.

One day, some towers fell
and the house near the park

became a house under ash,

so they escaped in backpacks,
on bicycles to dark rooms,

but the loft on Wooster Street

was built for an artist,
not a family of pigeons

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

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

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

His hands no longer fit his camera.
No longer fit his wife's.

No longer fit his body.

Sweet potato boy mashed his fists
into his mouth

until he had nothing more to say.

So this girl without freckles
went treasure hunting on her own.

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

and the loft with the 12-foot ceilings
and the darkroom with too many sinks,

under the color balanced lights,
she found a note,

tacked to the wall with a thumbtack,
left over from a time before towers,

from a time before babies,
and the note said,

a guy sure loves a girl
who works in the dark.

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

His first time out,
he followed the Christmas lights,

dotting their way
through New York City's trees.

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

A year later, he traveled
across the country

to follow a forest fire,
stayed for a week

hunting it with his camera.
It was ravaging the west coast,

eating 18-wheeler trucks in its stride.
On the other side of the country,

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

We have both learned the art of capture.

Maybe we are learning
the art of embracing.

Maybe we are learning
the art of letting go.