1
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999


2
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I see the moon

3
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
the moon sees me

4
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
the moon sees somebody

5
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
that I don't see

6
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
God bless the moon

7
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and God bless me

8
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and God bless the somebody 
that I don't see

9
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
If I get to heaven

10
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
before you do

11
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I'll make a hole

12
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and pull you through

13
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and I'll write your name

14
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
on every star

15
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and that way the world

16
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
won't seem so far

17
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
The astronaut will not be at work today.
He has called in sick.

18
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
He has turned off his cell phone,
his laptop, his pager, his alarm clock.

19
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
There is a fat yellow cat asleep on his couch,
raindrops against the window

20
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and not even the hint coffee
in the kitchen air.

21
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Everybody is in a tizzy.

22
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
The engineers on the fifteenth floor have
stopped working on their particle machine.

23
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
The anti-gravity room is leaking,
and even the freckled kid with glasses,

24
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
whose only job it is to take out the trash
is nervous, fumbles the bag,

25
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
spills the banana peel and a paper cup.
Nobody notices.

26
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
They are too busy re-calculating
what this will mean for lost time.

27
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
How many galaxies
are we losing per second?

28
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
How long before the next rocket
can be launched?

29
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Somewhere an electron
flies off its energy cloud.

30
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
A black hole has erupted.

31
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
A mother finishes setting
the table for dinner.

32
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
A "Law and Order" marathon is starting.
The astronaut is asleep.

33
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
He has forgotten to turn off his watch
which ticks like a metal pulse

34
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
against his wrist.
He does not hear it.

35
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
He dreams of coral reefs and plankton.

36
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
His fingers find the pillow cases,
sailing masts.

37
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
He turns on his side, opens his eyes once.

38
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
He thinks that scuba divers must have
the most wonderful job in the world,

39
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
so much water to glide through.

40
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Thank you.

41
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
When I was little,

42
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I could not understand the concept
that you could only live one life.

43
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And I don't mean this metaphorically --

44
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I mean I literally thought
that I was going to get to do

45
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
everything there was to do
and be everything there was to be.

46
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
It was only a matter of time.

47
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And there was no limitation

48
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
based on age or gender or race
or even appropriate time period.

49
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I was sure that I was
actually going to experience

50
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
what it felt like to be a leader
of the civil rights movement,

51
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
or a ten-year-old boy living on a farm
during the dust bowl.

52
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
or an emperor
of the Tang dynasty in China.

53
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
My mom says that when people asked me
what I wanted to be when I grew up,

54
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
my typical response was
princess, ballerina, astronaut,

55
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and what she doesn't understand is that

56
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I wasn't trying to invent
some combined super-profession.


57
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I was listing things I thought
I was going to get to be,

58
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
a princess and a ballerina
and an astronaut.

59
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And I'm pretty sure the list
probably went on from there --

60
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I usually just got cut off.

61
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
It was never a question of if
I was going to get to do something,

62
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
so much as a question of when.

63
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And I was sure
that if I was going to do everything

64
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
that it probably meant
that I had to move pretty quickly

65
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
because there was a lot of stuff 
I needed to do.

66
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
So my life was constantly
in a state of rushing.

67
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I was always scared
that I was falling behind,

68
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and since I grew up in New York City,
as far as I could tell,

69
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
rushing was pretty normal.

70
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
But as I grew up,
I had this sinking realization

71
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
that I wasn't going to get to live
any more than one life.

72
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I only knew what it felt like
to be a teenaged girl in New York City,

73
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
not a teenage boy in New Zealand,
not a prom queen in Kansas.

74
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I only got to see through my lens,
and it was around this time

75
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I became obsessed with stories
because it was through stories

76
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
that I was able to see
through someone else's lens,

77
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
however briefly or imperfectly.

78
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And I started craving
hearing other people's experiences

79
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
because I was so jealous
that there were entire lives

80
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
that I was never going to get to live

81
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and I wanted to hear about everything
that I was missing.

82
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And by the transitive property,

83
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I realized that some people were never
going to get to experience

84
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
what it felt like to be a teenage girl
in New York City --

85
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
which meant that
they weren't going to know

86
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
what the subway ride
after your first kiss feels like

87
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
or how quiet it gets when it snows,
and I wanted them to know.

88
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I wanted to tell them,
and this became the focus of my obsession.

89
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I busied myself telling stories
and sharing stories and collecting them

90
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and it's not until recently that I realized
that I can't always rush poetry.

91
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
In April, the National Poetry Month,

92
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
there's this challenge that many poets
in the poetry community participate in.

93
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And it's called the 30/30 challenge.

94
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And the idea is, you write a new poem

95
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
every single day
for the entire month of April

96
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and last year,
I tried it for the first time

97
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and was thrilled by the efficiency
at which I was able to produce poetry.

98
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
But at the end of the month,
I looked back at these 30 poems

99
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
that I had written and discovered that

100
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
they were all trying to tell
the same story,

101
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
it had just taken me 30 tries to figure out
the way that it wanted to be told.

102
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And I realized that
this is probably true of other stories

103
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
on an even larger scale.


104
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I have stories
that I have tried to tell for years,

105
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
re-writing and re-writing,
constantly searching for the right words.

106
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
There's a French poet and essayist
by the name of Paul Valéry who said that

107
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
a poem is never finished,
it is only abandoned,

108
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and this terrifies me because it implies

109
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
that I could keep re-editing
and re-writing forever

110
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and it's up to me to decide
when a poem's finished

111
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and when I can walk away from it.

112
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And this goes directly against
my very obsessive nature

113
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
to try to find the right answer
and the perfect words and the right form.

114
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And I use poetry in my life

115
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
as a way to help me navigate
and work through things

116
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
but just because I end a poem
doesn't mean that I've solved

117
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
what it was I was puzzling through.


118
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I like to re-visit old poetry
because it shows me exactly

119
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
where I was at that moment.

120
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
What it was I was trying to navigate
and the words that I chose to help me.

121
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Now I have a story

122
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
that I've been stumbling over
for years and years,

123
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
and I'm not sure if I've found
the perfect form,

124
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
or whether this is just one attempt,
and I will try to re-write it later

125
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
in search of a better way to tell it.
But I do know that later when I look back,

126
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
I will be able to know that
this is where I was at this moment.

127
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And this is what I was trying to navigate,
these words, here in this room, with you.

128
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
So, smile

129
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
It didn't always work this way.

130
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
There was a time
when you had to get your hands dirty.

131
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
When you were in the dark for most of it,
fumbling was a given..

132
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
If you needed more contrast,
more saturation,

133
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
darker darks and brighter brights,
they called it extended development.

134
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Meant you spent longer inhaling chemicals.
Longer up to your wrists.

135
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
It wasn't always easy.
Grandpa Stuart was a navy photographer.

136
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Young, red-faced with sleeves rolled up,
fists of fingers like fat rolls of coins,

137
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
he looked like
Popeye the Sailor Man, come to life.

138
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Crooked smile, tuft of chest hair,

139
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
he showed up to World War II
with a smirk and a hobby.

140
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
When they asked him
if he knew much about photography,

141
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
he lied, learned to read Europe like a map

142
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
upside down,
from the height of a fighter plane,

143
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
camera snapping, eyelids flapping,
the darkest darks and brightest brights,

144
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
he learned war
like he could read his way home.

145
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
When other men returned,
they put their weapons out to rust,

146
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
but he brought the lenses
and the cameras home with him,

147
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
opened a shop,
turned it into a family affair.

148
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
My father was born into this world,
a black and white.

149
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
His basketball hands
learned the tiny clicks and slides

150
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
of lens into frame, film into camera,
chemical into plastic bin,

151
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
his father knew the equipment
but not the art.

152
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
He knew the darks but not the brights.

153
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
My father learned the magic,
spent his time following light.

154
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Once he traveled across the country
to follow a forest fire,

155
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
hunted with his camera for a week.

156
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Follow the light, he said.
Follow the light.

157
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
There are parts of me
I only recognize from photographs:

158
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
the loft on Wooster Street
with the creaky hallways,

159
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
the 12-foot ceilings,
white walls and cold floors.

160
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
This was my mother's home

161
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
before she was mother,
before she was wife, she was artist.

162
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
And the only two rooms in the house

163
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
with the walls that reached
all the way up to the ceiling

164
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
with doors that opened and closed
were the bathroom and the darkroom.

165
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
The darkroom she built herself
with custom-made stainless steel sinks,

166
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
an 8x10 bed enlarger that moved
up and down by a giant hand crank.

167
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
A bank of color balanced lights,
a white glass wall for viewing prints,

168
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
a drying rack
that moved in and out from the wall.

169
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
My mother built herself a dark room.