-
(Singing) 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
of 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 is to take
out the trash, is nervous,
-
fumbles the bag, spills
a banana peel and a paper cup.
-
Nobody notices.
-
They are too busy recalculating
what this all mean for lost time.
-
How many galaxies
are we losing per second?
-
How long before 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 & 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 pillowcase's sailing masts.
-
He turns on his side,
opens his eyes at once.
-
He thinks that scuba divers must have
the most wonderful job in the world.
-
So much water to glide through!
-
(Applause)
-
Thank you.
-
When I was little, I could
not understand the concept
-
that you could only live one life.
-
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 going
to actually 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 gonna 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 gonna get to do something
-
so much of a question of when.
-
And I was sure that if I was going
to do everything,
-
that it probably meant 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 gonna get to live
any more than one life.
-
I only knew what it felt like
to be a teenage 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
that 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 gonna get to live,
-
and I wanted to hear
about everything that I was missing.
-
And by transitive property,
-
I realized that some people
were never gonna get to experience
-
what it felt like to be a teenage girl
in New York city.
-
Which meant that they weren't gonna know
-
what the subway ride
after your first kiss feels like,
-
or how quiet it gets when its 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 for National Poetry Month,
there's this challenge
-
that many poets in the poetry
community participate in,
-
and its called the 30/30 Challenge.
-
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 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,
-
rewriting and rewriting and constantly
searching for the right words.
-
There's a French poet and essayist
by the name of Paul Valéry
-
who said a poem is never
finished, it is only abandoned.
-
And this terrifies me
-
because it implies that I could keep
re-editing and rewriting forever
-
and its up to me to decide
when a poem is 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 the poem,
doesn't mean that I've solved
-
what it was I was puzzling through.
-
I like to revisit old poetry
-
because it shows me exactly
where I was at that moment
-
and 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 prefect form,
-
or whether this is just one attempt
-
and I will try to rewrite 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,
-
with these words, here,
in this room, with you.
-
So --
-
Smile.
-
It didn't always work this way.
-
There's a time 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.
-
It meant you spent longer inhaling
chemicals, longer up to your wrist.
-
It wasn't always easy.
-
Grandpa Stewart was a Navy photographer.
-
Young, red-faced
with his 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 would put their weapons out to rest,
-
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 of 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 it 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 twelve-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 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 darkroom.
-
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 grayscale,
-
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 darkrooms 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.
-
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 darkrooms
-
But the loft of 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 basketball hands
put his weapons out to rest.
-
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.
-
The sweet potato boy mashed
his fists into his mouth
-
until he had nothing more to say.
-
So, the girl without freckles
went treasure hunting on her own.
-
And on Wooster Street, in a 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 thumb-tack,
left over from a time before towers,
-
from the time before babies.
-
And the note said: "A guy sure loves
the girl who works in the darkroom."
-
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.
-
(Applause)
Retired user
01:31 "the" is missing ("the next rocket")
Retired user
06:32 "perfect", not "prefect"