This is a longer poem and it's called,
it has the modest title of "The State of the Planet."
[LAUGHTER]
And it was written because a friend
of mine works at the Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory at Columbia University, which is
a geophysical studies center.
And they were having their 50th anniversary
and she asked me if I would write a poem for the occasion
and I said that would be interesting to do.
And I can tell you that a really great way to feel terrible
is to write the state of the planet
on top of a blank sheet of paper--
[LAUGHTER]
--it was half an hour later, you pick up your forehead from
the desk and stare at the --
But anyway, so--
I eventually did this.
"October on the planet at the century's end splatters
of rain lashing the windshield through the blurred glass
gusts of a Pacific storm are battering a huge shank
needled Himalayan cedar, one of the ancients of the Earth,
which rocks slightly almost gravely with the force.
Under it, a Japanese plum, not Japanese and not a plum,
it throws off the vertical cascade of leaves
the color of skinned copper if copper could be skinned.
And under it, her gait as elegant and supple
as the young of any of Earth's species.
A schoolgirl, one of the $6 billion
of her hungry and curious kind, negotiates a crosswalk.
Her hair flying, the red satchel on her point straight back,
darkening splotch by smoky crimson splotch with rain.
Inside the backpack, dog-eared, full of instructive
illustrations, there must be a book
with the title like "Getting to know your planet".
The book will tell her that the Earth this month has yawed
a little distance from the sun and that the air cooling has
begun to move as sensitive to temperature
as skin is to a lover's touch.
It will call this restlessness the wind,
it will also tell her that the air, its
likely to say the troposphere, has trapped emissions
from the cars idling like mine while she crosses.
And is making a greenhouse of the atmosphere.
The book will say that climate is complicated,
that we may be doing this and if we
are it will explain that this was something we did quite
accidentally, which she can understand not having meant
that morning to have spilled the milk.
She's one of those who's only hungry metaphorically.
Poetry, ought to be able to comprehend the Earth,
to set aside from time to time its natural idioms of ardor
and revulsion, and say in style as sober
as the latin of Lucretius who reported to Lady Venus
on the state of things 2000 years ago.
"It's your doing that under the whaling
constellations of the sky", he wrote
"all nature teams with life".
Ought to be able to say something of the Earth
beyond our human dramas.
Topsoil going fast, rivers dammed and fouled,
cod about fished out, haddock about fished out,
Pacific salmon nosing in against dams from Yokohama
to Kamchatka to Seattle and Portland flailing
of fish slanders against turbines in a rage to breed.
Most of the ancient groves are gone,
sacred to Quan Yin at Artemis, sacred to the gods
and goddesses in every picture book of myths
she's apt to read.
Lucretious, we have grown so clever
that a mechanic learned in natural philosophy
has taken the gene for luminescence from the jellyfish
and put it into mice.
If you extinguish the oil lamp, they give off greenish light.
An artist in Chicago, think of it
as a lively trading city in Dacia or Thracia,
has asked to be taught the method,
so he can market a breed of dachshunds that glow
in the dark.
Somewhere in the book, there will be photographs of fossils.
If she lived in Michigan or the Ukraine
not California, she'd find washed up
on the beach in a storm like this,
limestone fossils of Devonian coral,
she could study the faint white markings,
she might have to lick the stone to see them
if the wind was drying the pale surface
even as she held it to bring the picture back of what
40 million years ago, life was.
A honeycomb with mouths."