WEBVTT

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We're going back to
Philadelphia now.

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But let's start over now,
this time with a wider lens.

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The focus not on a
nation, but on nature.

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This poem was written when
a friend called me one day

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and she said, I feel like
everything is ending.

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Please tell me
everything is starting.

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This is the kind of phone
calls I get regularly.

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So this poem is called--

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I'm going to tell
you the title--

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not surprisingly,
"Everything is Starting."

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It starts in spring, naturally,
in Center City, Philadelphia,

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and then it moves
out from there out

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into the cosmos in
time and scale, all

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the way to the birth
of the universe.

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For a gloss on that,
in the poem the phrase,

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"the red edge of creation"
refers to the fact

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that as you look
further out in space,

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you are looking back in time.

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And at the very outer edge
of the expanding universe,

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our instruments see the
radiation from the Big Bang.

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Its light is shifted
toward the red--

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the red frequency, which you
get when you get great speed,

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and that is the speed at which
the universe is moving away.

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I hope not from us.

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There is also an
updated reference

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to the end of Dante's Divine
Comedy, in the Paradiso,

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he imagines the seventh
heaven as an enormous rose

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of light in and out of
which bees are flying,

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the blessed souls.

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So.

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I do love post-its.

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I do.

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"The snow is filthy
now; it has been

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drinking oil and soot and
car exhausts for days,

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and dogs have marked it
with their special brand

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of brilliant yellow piss.

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For a week after it fell, the
snow stood in frozen horror

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at the icy chill, and
hardened on the top, and then,

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today, the thaw--

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now everything is
starting up again--

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the traffic flows,
the place where

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dogs pause, and sniff, becomes,
once more, invisible to us,

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and in the gutters
of our streets,

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a minor Nile floods from the old
drifts into the gasping drains.

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Even the sewers are jubilant in
the rush that foretells spring.

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The rats dance along the pipes.

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On all the trees, the buds
push against the sealed bark,

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as if against the
tight containment

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of the past, while
deep in the Florida

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Keys, along some slow canal,
the manatees roll heavily

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in the dark stream,
and the cranes look up,

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unrolling their long necks,
possessed by restlessness just

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before they fly--

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light-years away, beyond
the veils of the Milky Way,

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out at the red edge of creation,
where everything is always

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starting, there--

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A memory shifts and
gathers itself once more--

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a memory of the time, if
time it can be called,

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when all that is the matter,
or all that matter is,

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is drawn into one place, as
if into a single thought,

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and, unimaginable, ignites,
shattering the ageless night

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in which the cosmos
only dreamed,

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and in the oldest memory, of
which I think we have a share,

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it was an endlessly
unfolding flower of fire--

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the rose of light
that Dante saw,

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its afterimage in the soul.

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And from that flower, the seeds
of all the galaxies were sown--

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now, in our own
the snow recedes,

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the buds will shatter
the end of every twig--

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as everything is
starting up again--

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the crocus pokes
its purple, furled,

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above the thawing ground.

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And when the local ember of
that first fiery bloom, our sun,

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touches its silk
with light, it will

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unfurl, in perfect silence--

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unlike us, jubilant
and noisy, who

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never were the point,
but still delight

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in being the sole narrators,
upstarts of the dawn."

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