So this next poem is really all over the map.
It has lots of things in it, and because you only
get to hear it once-- you know, on the page,
you can reread things, but you're only
going to hear it once, so I'm just going to warn you.
We have the International Space Station in the title.
We have evolution.
We have the geomorphology of Florida.
We have the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs.
We have the civil war in Syria and terrorism in general.
And at the end of the poem--
this had been going on for years when I wrote it,
and it is still in the news regularly now--
the crisis of the refugees in the Mediterranean.
"Day Beginning with Seeing the International Space
Station and a Full Moon Over the Gulf of Mexico
and All Its Invisible Fishes."
"None of this had to happen.
Not Florida.
Not the ibis's beak.
Not water.
Not the horseshoe crab's empty body and not
the living starfish.
Evolution might have turned left at the corner
and gone down another street entirely.
The asteroid might have missed.
The seams of limestone need not have
been susceptible to sand and mangroves.
The radio might have found a different music.
The hips of one man and the hips of another
might have stood beside each other on a bus in Aleppo
and recognized themselves as long-lost brothers.
The key could have broken off in the lock,
and the nail-can refused its lid.
I might have been the fish the brown pelican swallowed.
You might have been the way the moon kept not setting
long after we thought it would, long after the sun was catching
inside the low wave curls coming in at a certain angle.
The light might not have been eaten again by its moving.
If the unbearable were not weightless,
we might yet buckle under the grief
of what hasn't changed yet.
Across the world, a man pulls a woman
from the water, from which the leapt-from overfilled boat has
entirely vanished.
From the water pulls one child, another.
Both are living, and both will continue to live.
This did not have to happen.
No part of this had to happen."