And this is the last one.
This is May 2021.
You'll hear about tardigrades in this poem, which
are little tiny, microscopic creatures, if you don't know.
And then you'll also hear about Oumuamua,
which was the first confirmed interstellar object that passed
through our solar system.
So a visitor from far beyond.
May 2021.
Dear--.
With mountains masked between us and the city,
stars against the dark bloomed like lichen,
embroidered across a curve of rock, celadon and burnt sienna
waves, a world entire for tardigrades,
their diminutive lives complete within it.
I find that I love geology, evolution, the night sky
because nothing about it is human.
No failed intentions or desire for clear meaning,
but the role of eons.
Not an active force, but a way of saying what
accretes: glacial weight, pressing downhill
without a mind.
"Have you ever given orders to the morning?"
God says from the whirlwind.
And Job to that living distance can only
say, "I did not understand."
A visitor slid across our solar system
or rather we slid past it and our instruments trained
on the deep only just perceived it, leaving us to piece
together what we overtook.
Shard of an exoplanet, behemoth of nitrogen ice,
we clipped past and left behind.
Once, I thought I was a mind within a body.
Sometimes overrun, others overrunning.
The mind, myself able to reach out and know.
But I broke like a planet coming apart,
a mass unloosed to become a traveler through the night.
Spirit and flesh bound up always,
sublimating in the light of stars come close, journeying.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]