WEBVTT

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[APPLAUSE]

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Well, before we go
to the Galapagos,

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let's go to another desperately
barren place, Death Valley.

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I'll read a few of the poems
from the Death Valley sequence.

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I got to go there
with Stephen Strom,

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a distinguished astronomer,
retired from our faculty,

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and who's taken up landscape
photography as a huge project

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in his so-called "retirement."

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And I went there and wrote
this series of poems,

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and they're in that gorgeous
book of his photographs.

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I'll just read a few of these.

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I tried to really--

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I guess you can probably tell.

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I try to learn
things about science

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through geology,
evolutionary science.

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And I try to figure out, how can
this science sound like a song

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instead of like a
boring science textbook?

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So that was one of my challenges
with this series of poems

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in Death Valley, learning
everything I could about

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what is this place.

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And how is it so stark and bare?

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And what's going on here?

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What's its history,
human and natural?

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And what kind of songs might
it make me want to sing?

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So I'll read a few from
the Death Valley sequence.

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It has an epigraph from Rilke.

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"The future enters us--"

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[LOUD CAR ENGINES]

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[LAUGHTER]

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--and so does the present.

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[LAUGHTER]

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"The future enters us in
order to transform itself

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in us long before it happens."

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One.

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"Forget what you think you know
about beauty and what lasts.

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These forsaken hills and
salt flats, erosion, dune,

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and crustacean are ghosts of
a lake, a storm, a savannah,

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all here and gone,
like the stars

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that blew apart to make the
complicated molecules here

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now organized and named
Funeral Hills, and Eureka

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Valley, Dante's View,
and Zabriskie Point,

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a vast space where the
land can think about itself

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without distractions.

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Perfect in its
desolation and yet,

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full of the long
story of invention

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that has been
spilling out of space.

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The dull force that has been
pulling the valley apart.

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The blazing heat that
has purified the air

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and made the past
lie down to rest,

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the future to wait for a
moment before descending."

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This is number two.

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"Black ribbon of asphalt
unspools through the Amargosa

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chaos, as you leave
the dull glow of towns

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forgotten when mines shut down.

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And you descend
through chalk hills

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stained with iron red bands to
rain gutted and gutted by time.

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A place where migrant and miner
picked their way through rock,

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made tea from
twigs, forced water

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to rise in a dry pit
they came to call a well.

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And marked with stovepipe.

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Their lost voices
distant as the bells that

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hung on a mine mule's harness.

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Echoing long the tasks once
necessary in the world's

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machinery, then lost.

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The place opens a rift
in you, right down

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to the fossil bed
of your cells."

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This is number eight.

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"Land this impoverished and
vast could be another planet.

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Not Earth, with
its celebrity glow

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of blue ocean and green terrain.

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Salt stain leaks
across the flats.

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Dirt flow and rubble seam
out from the Panamints

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into alluvial fans.

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And the Funeral Mountains rumple
like the ruched, black silk

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of Victorian mourning.

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Heartless and sear,
the desert does not

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nurture the complacent.

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Whatever lives here has learned.

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The kangaroo rat, to
live without water.

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The coyote melon, to let
its above ground parts die.

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Rock, bent and re-bent.

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Slopes jarred with fault and
slippage, force of the planet's

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slow flex and strain.

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The valley rent in two
as underlying plates

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grind past each other.

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How perfect the
illusion of stillness."

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[APPLAUSE]

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You don't need to do that.

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You can do it a lot in the end.

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Number nine.

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"Sometimes it seems as if time
is the material of which we're

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made.

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Grain by grain we add
up, like sand ground

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down to gritty beads
by an archaic sea.

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Chalk hills built
up, grain by grain

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from crushed mollusks
and crustaceans.

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How many clamshells does it
take to build an Acropolis?

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Ridge after ridge
lined up like dancers

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in reciprocating gesture,
flirting with embrace,

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but keeping their distance.

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Posed at just so intervals, as
if choreographed into pattern

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and form.

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Though it is the eye
that choreographs."

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And one more from this series.

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"Some scientists say
it was inevitable

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that the universe would make
beings able to comprehend

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the cosmic story.

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And that we'd keep looking
into the dark energy of what we

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don't know for something
we perceive that isn't.

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It was never enough
for us just to survive.

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We had to make
something of ourselves,

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give something
back of ourselves,

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register our inner lives
in the record of what is.

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We are not just made of
the same material as stars,

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but of the same
self-ordering force that

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thinks it can do
something about entropy.

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The universe, a
glitter in a salt pan."

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