WEBVTT

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I think-- I just thought
of this just this second.

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I feel like there's
something maybe

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about having grown up
in the ring of fire,

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that I had firestorms that
could just happen at any time

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and come roaring down the
hillside behind my house,

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and coyotes, and stuff
that could eat you,

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and waves that you just be
hanging out by the beach

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and like, oh, 30-foot
wave from nowhere.

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That kind of stuff was
part of my upbringing.

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So [LAUGHS] oh, and earthquakes,
right, and tsunamis,

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and mudslides.

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So there's a way
in which I think

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my cortisol is just
up all the time

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anyway, where it comes
to natural catastrophes.

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But then I get mad
because I'm like, wow,

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it was bad already, why do we
have to make it worse, right?

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Why are we the ones to push it?

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So with the
exception of a couple

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of the poems that I was
holding up books from,

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most of the poems that
I'm reading for you today

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are from this new
book that's coming

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in February, on which there's
the dead stump, that's

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shaped like a heart.

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[CLEARS THROAT]

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The book's called
Trophic Cascade.

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And the title borrows
from the ecological term

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that speaks to how the removal
or the replacement of a trophy

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creature, a species at the
top of an ecological chain

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changes everything about
what happens around it.

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The trophy creature could be
my daughter, could be my elders

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coming or going.

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But then it could be
all these other things

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upon which we're dependent.

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"There's no way for
me to think about how

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human intervention in
the Earth's systems

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are changing everything
we know, everything

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we are and our fellow
inhabitants on the planet count

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on, everything about everything.

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How can my poems not be
obsessed with these questions?

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How can I not, as my
students voiced this week,

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be consumed by concerns about
how my poems can participate

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in a conversation
that might affect

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some sort of positive change?

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My imagination is built
out of the world in which I

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have lived, the world
I hope will still

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be around for my
daughter, for my students.

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And yet, I'm aware of
how much my being here,

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my bringing this
person into the world

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to explode these populations
and the pressures

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that I put on the
world, how that

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has made me complicit
in the very changes that

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keep me awake."

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Trophic Cascade.

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"After the reintroduction of
gray wolves to Yellowstone

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and, as anticipated,
their culling of deer,

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trees grew up beyond the deer
stunt of the mid-century.

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In their upreach,
songbirds nested,

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who scattered seed for
underbrush, and in that cover

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warrened snowshoe hare.

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Weasel and water shrew
returned, also vole,

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and came soon hawk and
falcon, bald eagle, kestrel,

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and with them hawk
shadow, falcon shadow.

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Eagle shade and kestrel shade
haunted newly-berried runnels,

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where mule deer no
longer rummaged,

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cautious as they were now of
being surprised by wolves.

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Berries brought bear, while
undergrowth and willows,

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growing now right
down to the river,

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brought beavers, who dam.

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Muskrats came to the
dams, and tadpoles.

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Came, too, the night song
of the fathers of tadpoles.

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With water striders, the
dark gray American dipper

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bobbed in fresh pools of
the river, and fish stayed.

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And the bear, who fished,
also culled deer fawns.

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And to their kill scraps
came vulture and coyote,

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long gone in the
region until now.

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And their scat scattered seed.

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And more trees,
brush, and berries

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grew up along the river that had
run straight, and so flooded,

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but thus dammed,
compelled to meander,

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is less prone to overrun.

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Don't you tell me this is
not the same as my story.

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All this life born
from one hungry animal,

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this whole, new landscape,
the course of the river

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changed, I know this.

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I reintroduced myself to
myself, this time a mother,

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after which nothing
was ever the same."

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