We're going back to Philadelphia now.
But let's start over now, this time with a wider lens.
The focus not on a nation, but on nature.
This poem was written when a friend called me one day
and she said, I feel like everything is ending.
Please tell me everything is starting.
This is the kind of phone calls I get regularly.
So this poem is called--
I'm going to tell you the title--
not surprisingly, "Everything is Starting."
It starts in spring, naturally, in Center City, Philadelphia,
and then it moves out from there out
into the cosmos in time and scale, all
the way to the birth of the universe.
For a gloss on that, in the poem the phrase,
"the red edge of creation" refers to the fact
that as you look further out in space,
you are looking back in time.
And at the very outer edge of the expanding universe,
our instruments see the radiation from the Big Bang.
Its light is shifted toward the red--
the red frequency, which you get when you get great speed,
and that is the speed at which the universe is moving away.
I hope not from us.
There is also an updated reference
to the end of Dante's Divine Comedy, in the Paradiso,
he imagines the seventh heaven as an enormous rose
of light in and out of which bees are flying,
the blessed souls.
So.
I do love post-its.
I do.
"The snow is filthy now; it has been
drinking oil and soot and car exhausts for days,
and dogs have marked it with their special brand
of brilliant yellow piss.
For a week after it fell, the snow stood in frozen horror
at the icy chill, and hardened on the top, and then,
today, the thaw--
now everything is starting up again--
the traffic flows, the place where
dogs pause, and sniff, becomes, once more, invisible to us,
and in the gutters of our streets,
a minor Nile floods from the old drifts into the gasping drains.
Even the sewers are jubilant in the rush that foretells spring.
The rats dance along the pipes.
On all the trees, the buds push against the sealed bark,
as if against the tight containment
of the past, while deep in the Florida
Keys, along some slow canal, the manatees roll heavily
in the dark stream, and the cranes look up,
unrolling their long necks, possessed by restlessness just
before they fly--
light-years away, beyond the veils of the Milky Way,
out at the red edge of creation, where everything is always
starting, there--
A memory shifts and gathers itself once more--
a memory of the time, if time it can be called,
when all that is the matter, or all that matter is,
is drawn into one place, as if into a single thought,
and, unimaginable, ignites, shattering the ageless night
in which the cosmos only dreamed,
and in the oldest memory, of which I think we have a share,
it was an endlessly unfolding flower of fire--
the rose of light that Dante saw,
its afterimage in the soul.
And from that flower, the seeds of all the galaxies were sown--
now, in our own the snow recedes,
the buds will shatter the end of every twig--
as everything is starting up again--
the crocus pokes its purple, furled,
above the thawing ground.
And when the local ember of that first fiery bloom, our sun,
touches its silk with light, it will
unfurl, in perfect silence--
unlike us, jubilant and noisy, who
never were the point, but still delight
in being the sole narrators, upstarts of the dawn."