And here's a poem that uses them all more than once.
It's about a particular place on the Olympic Peninsula,
that some of you may know.
On the northern coast on the Strait
of Juan de Fuca between the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver
Island there is a bit of land that reaches out
five miles into the sea.
The lighthouse at the end of it.
It's a bird sanctuary.
It's a very beautiful place, nowhere more than 50 yards wide
[INAUDIBLE].
There, in many ways, my life began, again.
It's called, "A Guide to Dungeness Spit."
Out of wild roses down from the switching road between pools,
we step to an arm of land washed from the sea.
On the windward shore the combers come from the strait,
from narrows and shoals far below sight.
To leeward, floating on trees in a blue cove,
the cormorants stretch to a point above us,
their wings held out like skysails.
Where shall we walk?
First, put your prints to the sea, fill them and pause there.
Five miles to the lighthouse, curved yellow-and-gray miles,
tossed among kelp, abandoned with bleaching rooftrees,
past reaches and currents.
And we must go afoot at a time when the tide is heeling.
Those whistling overhead are Canada geese.
Some on the waves are loons, and more on the sand are pipers.
There, Bonaparte's gulls settle a single perch.
Those are sponges.
Those are the ends of bones.
If we cross to the inner shore, the grebes and goldeneyes
rear themselves and plunge through the still surface,
fishing below the dunes and rising alarmed,
higher than waves.
Those are cockleshells.
And these are the dead.
I said we would come to these.
Stoop to the stones.
Overturn one, the gray and white inch-long crabs
come pulsing and clambering from their hollows,
tiptoeing sideways.
They lift their pincers to defend the dark.
Let us step this way.
Follow me closely past snowy plovers
bustling among the sand fleas.
The air grows dense.
You must decide now whether we should walk for miles and miles
and whether all birds are the young of other creatures
or their own young ones, or simply their old selves
because they die.
One falls, and the others touch him webfoot or with claws,
treading him for the ocean.
This is called sanctuary.
Those are feathers and scales.
We both go into mist, and it hooks behind us.
Those are foghorns.
Wait, and the bird on the high root
is a snowy owl facing the sea.
Its flashing yellow eyes turn past us and return.
And turning from the calm shore to the breakers, utterly still,
they lead us by the bay and through the shallows,
buoy us into the wind.
Those are tears.
Those are called houses, and those are people.
Here is a stairway past the whites of our eyes.
All our distance has ended in the light.
We climb to the light in spirals,
and look, between us we have come all the way,
and it never ends.
In the ocean, the spit and image of our guided travels.
Those are called ships.
We are called lovers.
There lie the mountains.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.