Now we're back to the other book, the one called Flood.
You may not care which book these things come from,
but if I open the wrong one, it's very embarrassing.
So I say these things to remind myself of where we are.
I want to read a poem called "Too Cold To Snow."
Everybody has heard that phrase even
if you should live in a climate like this one
where this is scarcely a threat.
We know that there's a folk wisdom which
holds that at a certain temperature,
it's too cold to snow.
And it does seem, if you live in a snow climate,
that there is a range when it very seldom snows,
but as a scientific notion, too cold to snow
has certain problems.
It fails to explain Antarctica, for example.
[LAUGHTER]
And it therefore passes into the reasonably large body of things
that we half believe without knowing why.
And maybe we do know why as we've actually
stopping to think about it.
Maybe the problem is that so much of what is around us
is difficult for us to explain and that while we all
know that reality resists precise and exact definitions,
this makes us nervous.
It makes us tired of dealing with all that irresolution
and ambiguity, and at times we love
having something to believe.
And the poem is--
this poem is about that notion, I guess.
"Too Cold To Snow."
"Probably because time's so short,
what poem might not begin like that.
We come to recognize stories so smoothed
by the currents of belief they're no longer stories.
Jazz putts up the river like a tugboat.
Abner Doubleday invents baseball.
We always hurt the ones we love, and it's
too cold to snow tonight in Terre Haute or Noblesville
or Beanblossom much less at either of earth's poles,
which is why those stark vast caps are esplanades of sand
but the camels there are frozen.
Even when it's too snowy to be cold,
I take long, thoughtful walks with the mysteries for company,
the space people, the unbroken gossip of the stars,
who the first person was to eat a lobster, how ambition causes
cancer.
And I might find a frozen leaf in the shape of Atlantis
if I knew for sure what shape that was, same
as the birthmark on the back of my true love's knee
in the fold.
If only I'd met my true love yet or if I have already.
If only I'd known it then."