So this is a moment of maximum risk.
This poem is about a week old, which
means if you see it again, it will definitely
be a little-- be somewhat different.
But I think it's ready enough to read.
And it begins with thinking about those extraordinary
photographs that have been sent back
to us from the new telescopes that show us realms so far
away, so impossibly, incredibly far away
from us and such harmony, such order and beauty among them.
It's called "Diamond Planet."
It also-- it's partly concerned with the-- also partly,
you will find its gestation is on the New York Subway.
A worker once said if he were locked in a prison, cell,
he would still be able to write because he
would have his childhood.
As long as I have the subway, I will be writing poems
because there's a perennial source of disruption,
entertainment, marvel.
"Diamond Planet."
"Those gorgeous photos the new telescope sends
back feel consoling now.
Grand processes happening without us
on the edge of this era and every other.
Their beauty, inextricable from how long ago,
how impossibly far away which may
be why the stark announcement on the wheeled lit-up
signboard parked by my corner market rankles.
So the nearest galaxy like ours is 15 million light years away.
A sudden window opened on a vastness we won't ever cross,
which may be why a guy on the A train who's either off his meds
or fueled to liquid oblivion is pounding
on a poem framed under acrylic on the car's metal wall.
Nearly wailing on it, backing up, then
hurling himself forward.
Forearms and fists smashed against the text
over and over while he moans with such abandon,
we've ceded him half the car.
Can the poem be that bad?
Maybe knowing it's 15 million years at lightspeed
before you're anyplace remotely like home
makes a poem seem worse.
I don't dare get close enough to read it.
But I admit I'm starting to hate it too for what it probably
doesn't do.
We're just trying to hold the morning a little steady
here, get ourselves to work almost on time,
and somebody writes a poem that doesn't
make the distance between a stanza
and the stars feel one bit smaller.
And somebody else has the nerve to publish it on the train,
for God's sake, where you can't help but read it.
Even if it isn't brave or reckless enough
to take up the task of naming our situation,
won't even try to make us feel more legible,
or say why we feel-- we all feel so singular and discontent.
Probably the poem I'm afraid to approach doesn't do that.
But we don't need this maniac pointing that out or beating
the poor thing to pulp and shatter.
I can't write that desolate poem either.
And if I could, who'd want to read it on a train surrounded
by strangers?
I only want to tell you, I want to tell you
what I've learned looking at photos
of ancient starlight, what reconfigured the night for me.
A sign to trace the source of a signal from far out.
A steady pulse going erratic in brief pattern beats.
Intentional, perhaps?
A code?
A new telescope found the flicker was interrupted
starlight blinking at an immense dark planet, orbit of the star.
A planet entirely composed of carbon
under tremendous pressure since that planet was huge
and near its star.
And what happens to pressurized carbon?
One vast diamond.
Surface blackened by debris from the winds of space.
But beneath the dust, a nearly unthinkable clarity
shot through with those flaws and stresses that write,
any gleam more visible, a grand poem containing and increasing
the light of its star.
So near.
Imagine when it turns on its axis,
and the continuous sudden filaments of caught starlight
fire every line, vaulting that seeming endless.
It doesn't matter how far away it is or that none of us
will ever see it.
None of us ever go there, ever see inside, much less read it
to the end so to have one intact, something close enough
to forever, not ours.
And if it signals, it's only to tell us or anyone it is there.
It is so."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.