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
with 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.