WEBVTT

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And this is the last one.

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This is May 2021.

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You'll hear about tardigrades
in this poem, which

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are little tiny, microscopic
creatures, if you don't know.

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And then you'll also
hear about Oumuamua,

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which was the first confirmed
interstellar object that passed

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through our solar system.

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So a visitor from far beyond.

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May 2021.

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Dear--.

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With mountains masked
between us and the city,

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stars against the dark
bloomed like lichen,

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embroidered across a curve of
rock, celadon and burnt sienna

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waves, a world entire
for tardigrades,

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their diminutive lives
complete within it.

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I find that I love geology,
evolution, the night sky

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because nothing
about it is human.

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No failed intentions or
desire for clear meaning,

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but the role of eons.

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Not an active force,
but a way of saying what

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accretes: glacial
weight, pressing downhill

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without a mind.

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"Have you ever given
orders to the morning?"

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God says from the whirlwind.

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And Job to that living
distance can only

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say, "I did not understand."

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A visitor slid across
our solar system

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or rather we slid past it
and our instruments trained

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on the deep only just perceived
it, leaving us to piece

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together what we overtook.

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Shard of an exoplanet,
behemoth of nitrogen ice,

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we clipped past and left behind.

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Once, I thought I was
a mind within a body.

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Sometimes overrun,
others overrunning.

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The mind, myself able
to reach out and know.

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But I broke like a
planet coming apart,

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a mass unloosed to become a
traveler through the night.

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Spirit and flesh
bound up always,

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sublimating in the light of
stars come close, journeying.

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Thank you so much.

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[APPLAUSE]

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