WEBVTT

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[APPLAUSE]

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Thank you.

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We talked today in the
class about my interest

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in ancient history, and
I'm really interested--

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in a way that I'm sure
everyone in this room

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is but I know that I am--

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I'm interested in
the idea of what

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it means to be human
rather than other things

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and to know that we occupy,
as humans, what we've thought

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to be a special
place and perhaps is

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a special place on this planet.

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I don't know that
we've always treated

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our special place, our special
privilege, with all due care.

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But I sometimes agree
with someone like Rilke

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who said that-- who
suggested that we might

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be the scribes of the Earth--
the consciousness of the Earth

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that can reflect back on itself.

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And I take that vocation
really seriously.

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This is the first poem
in my new book, Chariot.

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And I'll just read about
eight poems from this book.

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They're all short.

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I wrote a lot of longer
poems in the previous books,

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and as I was telling
the class today,

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I decided that I would write
a book of just 20-line poems.

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And I wrote this book during
the brunt of the pandemic,

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from about March 2020
until August 2022.

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This poem is called
"In My Life."

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I live in a part of Brooklyn--
a fine part of Brooklyn,

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but we also we live next to
a very polluted waterway that

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became polluted through all of
the efforts of industrial life

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in the city back
in the 19th century

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through parts of the 20th.

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"In My Life."

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I have never seen the
Milky Way, the way

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it looks in pictures in my
feed on Instagram, which

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is to say like
the trail of froth

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a sperm whale makes in
videos when it swims up

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close to the air, but
immeasurably more luminous

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and spattered everywhere
in tiny barnacles of stars,

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whole portions of the sky
stained improbably azure,

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purple, teal, a general
sense of superimposition

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but no real threat of
being pounced on or made

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to suffer in captivity, the
specter of symphonic music off

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in the background of the mind,
relaxing with neurochemicals,

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any suspicion vis-a-vis
authenticity or preference

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to not be made a fool
of except by invitation,

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telling itself
somewhere along the way

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it agreed to go along
with everything so

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long as no one gets hurt--

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But I have seen its local
counterpart and the residues

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of industry haunting
the Gowanus Canal,

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polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
and polychlorinated biphenyls,

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coal tar wastes and heavy
metals dazzling the surface

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of the waterway in galactic
shapes in peacock green, gold,

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sapphire, and while
I have no desire

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to make pollution beautiful
or to see it romantically,

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a voice says that's
exactly what I'm

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doing, while another whispers
down to me from a remove,

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saying I am in my
life like a dolphin,

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like a dolphin
trapped in a cove.

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