[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
We talked today in the class about my interest
in ancient history, and I'm really interested--
in a way that I'm sure everyone in this room
is but I know that I am--
I'm interested in the idea of what
it means to be human rather than other things
and to know that we occupy, as humans, what we've thought
to be a special place and perhaps is
a special place on this planet.
I don't know that we've always treated
our special place, our special privilege, with all due care.
But I sometimes agree with someone like Rilke
who said that-- who suggested that we might
be the scribes of the Earth-- the consciousness of the Earth
that can reflect back on itself.
And I take that vocation really seriously.
This is the first poem in my new book, Chariot.
And I'll just read about eight poems from this book.
They're all short.
I wrote a lot of longer poems in the previous books,
and as I was telling the class today,
I decided that I would write a book of just 20-line poems.
And I wrote this book during the brunt of the pandemic,
from about March 2020 until August 2022.
This poem is called "In My Life."
I live in a part of Brooklyn-- a fine part of Brooklyn,
but we also we live next to a very polluted waterway that
became polluted through all of the efforts of industrial life
in the city back in the 19th century
through parts of the 20th.
"In My Life."
I have never seen the Milky Way, the way
it looks in pictures in my feed on Instagram, which
is to say like the trail of froth
a sperm whale makes in videos when it swims up
close to the air, but immeasurably more luminous
and spattered everywhere in tiny barnacles of stars,
whole portions of the sky stained improbably azure,
purple, teal, a general sense of superimposition
but no real threat of being pounced on or made
to suffer in captivity, the specter of symphonic music off
in the background of the mind, relaxing with neurochemicals,
any suspicion vis-a-vis authenticity or preference
to not be made a fool of except by invitation,
telling itself somewhere along the way
it agreed to go along with everything so
long as no one gets hurt--
But I have seen its local counterpart and the residues
of industry haunting the Gowanus Canal,
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and polychlorinated biphenyls,
coal tar wastes and heavy metals dazzling the surface
of the waterway in galactic shapes in peacock green, gold,
sapphire, and while I have no desire
to make pollution beautiful or to see it romantically,
a voice says that's exactly what I'm
doing, while another whispers down to me from a remove,
saying I am in my life like a dolphin,
like a dolphin trapped in a cove.