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 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?
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.