[APPLAUSE]
Thank you all.
Thank you.
Let me see where we are now with time.
I mean, I know obviously, I have more time,
but I want to make sure I'm mindful of time.
So this is the poem that I wrote when I was staying at Aloft--
the second half of it, I wrote there.
And I nod to a palm tree.
I pretend that I saw it in Los Angeles,
but I saw it over there.
[LAUGHTER]
Fascination.
Raleigh filled his cargo hold with sassafras
to carry it from the New World to England,
hoping it cured syphilis, which it didn't, but its fragrance
was just heavenly enough to make you think a miracle wasn't
completely out of the question.
Elizabeth herself looked out across the blue hypnosis
of ocean, saw infection in the form of 132 Spanish vessels,
and prohibited the setting sail of any one of England's own,
having awakened to a military need for many hulls,
for masts that tower, for wind loud fabrics
but bettered with use, for decks seasoned by the tread
of subjects, their finer British aspects, reserve, and so forth.
Meanwhile, John White, governor of Roanoke, rich in sassafras
but otherwise an inauspicious choice for the crown's toehold
in the Americas, is back in town for emergency supplies and aid.
But given Elizabeth's stay of shipping,
won't be allowed to return to Roanoke for years.
Two long years, White pounds his pewter
tankard down, having abandoned wife and daughter to an end
without an author.
His tankard cylindrical, lidded with an acorn thumb piece
and filled with ale whose froth spatters
on the tabletops in meaningful patterns he can't yet discern.
First the arrowhead of Hatteras, then a crescent of the armada,
then at last a mitten or one or three lobed leaf of sassafras.
Frequent thickener of stews for the Choctaw,
who still dry its foliage and grind it into a powder
high in mucilage which is found also in quantity in okra.
Whose seed pods are said to have been taken from Africa
to feed the colonies growing slave population as
cheaply as possible.
High on the list of heat and drought resistant crops, okra
means to live despite untenable conditions,
and deserves a tribute unique among those
owed to every plant whose leaf, root, flower, berry,
bark, or fruit has gotten us as far as this without complaint.
Aloe, apple, artichoke, and asparagus to start.
Then aubergine, a favorite of Alexander the Great, who
carried it from India and into Babylon despite his astronomers
warning that the thunderous local deity, Marduk, had enough
already.
But the Macedonian was pretty sure a promise
to repair Marduk's temple, its ruins since Sennacherib toppled
it and fell-- in ruins since Sennacherib toppled it and felt
by fringe historians to have been the true Tower of Babel,
might serve to soften the god's heart.
But apparently not.
Alexander's coffin, all gold, filled with rumored honey
and carried west far from his deathbed
in the palace built by Nebuchadnezzar centuries
earlier, came to rest in Alexandria, founded
by and named for himself.
Site where his successor, Ptolemy, eventually
built the celebrated library that Callimachus worked at.
And whose fiery destruction was traumatic as a blunt force
to the head of humanity.
You can still feel it today.
Cherokee drank a tea of sassafras
root to dispollute the blood in Raleigh's day,
but knew never to drink it more than a week at a time.
English colonists came, saw, and concocted a copycat tonic that
mutated into the diet root beer I have here,
its frothy head no longer an intricate play of sassafras
mucilage because the FDA determined
a principal in the root was hepatocarcinogenic to rodent
life in 1960.
Now most manufacturers add extract of soap bark
to parrot the effect.
In his life of Alexander, Plutarch
recalls that the hero was born on the same day Herostratus
set the temple of Diana and Ephesus
ablaze so that his name would live forever.
Soap bark acts as a foaming agent
in many fire extinguishers.
Without his imprisonment and brace of assistants,
Raleigh wouldn't have produced the history
of the world whose first book states
that the greatest wonder of the earth is the palm tree.
I have stood beneath a tall one in LA
and watched its full fronds seethe like the mane of a lion.
Diana's temple, the way the Ephesian workforce fixed it,
is remembered as one of the seven wonders of antiquity,
its chalk white blinding under chicory blue Turkish skies.
I hear the fingertips of history thrum on tabletops in Roanoke
and when popcorn bursts as it spins in my microwave.
When I open the bag opposite my kitchen window,
the night reflects my face back in at me
through the steam expressed from kernels
to fascinate its way back into the water cycle
in order to be the rain that fed the sassafras we hid in
before I had to be human.