-
I see the moon.
-
The moon sees me.
-
The moon sees somebody
-
that I don't see.
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God bless the moon,
-
and God bless me.
-
And God bless the somebody
that I don't see.
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If I get to heaven
-
before you do,
-
I'll make a hole
-
and pull you through.
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And I'll write your name
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on every star.
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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 15th 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're 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?
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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.
Retired user
01:31 "the" is missing ("the next rocket")
Retired user
06:32 "perfect", not "prefect"