WEBVTT

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This is a longer
poem and it's called,

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it has the modest title of
"The State of the Planet."

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[LAUGHTER]

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And it was written
because a friend

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of mine works at the
Lamont-Doherty Earth

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Observatory at Columbia
University, which is

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a geophysical studies center.

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And they were having
their 50th anniversary

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and she asked me if I would
write a poem for the occasion

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and I said that would
be interesting to do.

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And I can tell you that a really
great way to feel terrible

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is to write the
state of the planet

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on top of a blank
sheet of paper--

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[LAUGHTER]

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--it was half an hour later,
you pick up your forehead from

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the desk and stare at the --

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But anyway, so--

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I eventually did this.

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"October on the planet at
the century's end splatters

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of rain lashing the windshield
through the blurred glass

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gusts of a Pacific storm
are battering a huge shank

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needled Himalayan cedar, one
of the ancients of the Earth,

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which rocks slightly almost
gravely with the force.

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Under it, a Japanese plum,
not Japanese and not a plum,

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it throws off the
vertical cascade of leaves

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the color of skinned copper
if copper could be skinned.

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And under it, her gait
as elegant and supple

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as the young of any
of Earth's species.

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A schoolgirl, one
of the $6 billion

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of her hungry and curious
kind, negotiates a crosswalk.

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Her hair flying, the red satchel
on her point straight back,

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darkening splotch by smoky
crimson splotch with rain.

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Inside the backpack,
dog-eared, full of instructive

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illustrations,
there must be a book

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with the title like "Getting
to know your planet".

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The book will tell her that
the Earth this month has yawed

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a little distance from the sun
and that the air cooling has

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begun to move as
sensitive to temperature

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as skin is to a lover's touch.

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It will call this
restlessness the wind,

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it will also tell
her that the air, its

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likely to say the troposphere,
has trapped emissions

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from the cars idling like
mine while she crosses.

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And is making a greenhouse
of the atmosphere.

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The book will say that
climate is complicated,

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that we may be
doing this and if we

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are it will explain that this
was something we did quite

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accidentally, which she can
understand not having meant

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that morning to have
spilled the milk.

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She's one of those who's
only hungry metaphorically.

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Poetry, ought to be able
to comprehend the Earth,

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to set aside from time to time
its natural idioms of ardor

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and revulsion, and
say in style as sober

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as the latin of Lucretius
who reported to Lady Venus

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on the state of
things 2000 years ago.

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"It's your doing that
under the whaling

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constellations of
the sky", he wrote

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"all nature teams with life".

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Ought to be able to say
something of the Earth

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beyond our human dramas.

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Topsoil going fast,
rivers dammed and fouled,

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cod about fished out,
haddock about fished out,

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Pacific salmon nosing in
against dams from Yokohama

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to Kamchatka to Seattle
and Portland flailing

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of fish slanders against
turbines in a rage to breed.

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Most of the ancient
groves are gone,

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sacred to Quan Yin at
Artemis, sacred to the gods

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and goddesses in every
picture book of myths

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she's apt to read.

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Lucretious, we have
grown so clever

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that a mechanic learned
in natural philosophy

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has taken the gene for
luminescence from the jellyfish

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and put it into mice.

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If you extinguish the oil lamp,
they give off greenish light.

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An artist in
Chicago, think of it

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as a lively trading city
in Dacia or Thracia,

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has asked to be
taught the method,

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so he can market a breed
of dachshunds that glow

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in the dark.

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Somewhere in the book, there
will be photographs of fossils.

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If she lived in
Michigan or the Ukraine

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not California,
she'd find washed up

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on the beach in a
storm like this,

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limestone fossils
of Devonian coral,

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she could study the
faint white markings,

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she might have to lick
the stone to see them

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if the wind was drying
the pale surface

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even as she held it to bring
the picture back of what

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40 million years ago, life was.

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A honeycomb with mouths."

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