I think-- I just thought of this just this second.
I feel like there's something maybe
about having grown up in the ring of fire,
that I had firestorms that could just happen at any time
and come roaring down the hillside behind my house,
and coyotes, and stuff that could eat you,
and waves that you just be hanging out by the beach
and like, oh, 30-foot wave from nowhere.
That kind of stuff was part of my upbringing.
So [LAUGHS] oh, and earthquakes, right, and tsunamis,
and mudslides.
So there's a way in which I think
my cortisol is just up all the time
anyway, where it comes to natural catastrophes.
But then I get mad because I'm like, wow,
it was bad already, why do we have to make it worse, right?
Why are we the ones to push it?
So with the exception of a couple
of the poems that I was holding up books from,
most of the poems that I'm reading for you today
are from this new book that's coming
in February, on which there's the dead stump, that's
shaped like a heart.
[CLEARS THROAT]
The book's called Trophic Cascade.
And the title borrows from the ecological term
that speaks to how the removal or the replacement of a trophy
creature, a species at the top of an ecological chain
changes everything about what happens around it.
The trophy creature could be my daughter, could be my elders
coming or going.
But then it could be all these other things
upon which we're dependent.
"There's no way for me to think about how
human intervention in the Earth's systems
are changing everything we know, everything
we are and our fellow inhabitants on the planet count
on, everything about everything.
How can my poems not be obsessed with these questions?
How can I not, as my students voiced this week,
be consumed by concerns about how my poems can participate
in a conversation that might affect
some sort of positive change?
My imagination is built out of the world in which I
have lived, the world I hope will still
be around for my daughter, for my students.
And yet, I'm aware of how much my being here,
my bringing this person into the world
to explode these populations and the pressures
that I put on the world, how that
has made me complicit in the very changes that
keep me awake."
Trophic Cascade.
"After the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone
and, as anticipated, their culling of deer,
trees grew up beyond the deer stunt of the mid-century.
In their upreach, songbirds nested,
who scattered seed for underbrush, and in that cover
warrened snowshoe hare.
Weasel and water shrew returned, also vole,
and came soon hawk and falcon, bald eagle, kestrel,
and with them hawk shadow, falcon shadow.
Eagle shade and kestrel shade haunted newly-berried runnels,
where mule deer no longer rummaged,
cautious as they were now of being surprised by wolves.
Berries brought bear, while undergrowth and willows,
growing now right down to the river,
brought beavers, who dam.
Muskrats came to the dams, and tadpoles.
Came, too, the night song of the fathers of tadpoles.
With water striders, the dark gray American dipper
bobbed in fresh pools of the river, and fish stayed.
And the bear, who fished, also culled deer fawns.
And to their kill scraps came vulture and coyote,
long gone in the region until now.
And their scat scattered seed.
And more trees, brush, and berries
grew up along the river that had run straight, and so flooded,
but thus dammed, compelled to meander,
is less prone to overrun.
Don't you tell me this is not the same as my story.
All this life born from one hungry animal,
this whole, new landscape, the course of the river
changed, I know this.
I reintroduced myself to myself, this time a mother,
after which nothing was ever the same."