It's a long walk.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
Stephanie, thank you so much for that beautiful introduction.
I hope I can live up to it.
And thank you all for being here.
I want to thank Michael Spurgeon and the Borchard Foundation,
and Diana Delgado, and everyone, everyone at the Poetry Center.
It is a home away from home for me.
I've been here, reading several times.
It always feels like a haven, a place--
one of those true kind of way stops,
or ends for the weary traveler.
Because here I know that people are--
you're reading poetry, you're living it, you're breathing it,
and communing spirit to spirit.
That's what it's all about, right?
So I was thinking about this--
the theme for the festival, and that it
is community, which, to me, I feel like poems are,
in a sense--
it's the best kind of community there can be.
And it's an honor, therefore, for me to be
able to read to you tonight.
I'm going to be reading from Playlist for the Apocalypse.
I never know exactly what I'm going to be reading.
The poem that Stephanie had just quoted,
"Demeter's Prayer to Hades," it's special for me
because at the moment, some of those words are on their way
to Jupiter.
They're in a space capsule.
So I think it's kind of amazing.
I don't know what those aliens are going to make of it,
but hey, what the heck.
I'm going to make sure that I can do this right.