And this poem is called "The Almost Island."
I live a block from a park which is a promontory in Lake
Washington that until the 1920s, when the level of Lake
Washington was lowered, because of the digging of a ship canal
, it was an island, just offshore,
just off the lake shore.
But it still was an island, and it still feels a lot like one.
It's a little over two miles in circumference,
and it's got some old woods in the middle of it, and trails.
And more than anything else, that's
what I moved for, to be able to spontaneously
just get up from my desk, and walk into a place
that beautiful.
This poem is called "The Almost Island."
"The woods which give me their silence,
their ancient Douglas firs, and red cedars, their ferns,
are not the wilderness.
They're contained in the two mile circumference of an almost
island, a park in city limits.
Pleasure boats crowd at weekends into the small bay.
The veils hiding the mountain are not always natural cloud.
Eagle and heron speak of solitude,
but when you emerge from forest shade,
the downtown skyline rears up, phantasmagoric but near,
across the water.
Yet the woods, the lake, the great winged birds,
the vast mountain at the horizon, are nature.
Metonymy of the spirit's understanding
knows them to be a concentrate of all Thoreau or Wordsworth
knew by that word, nature, a never failing principle
of joy and purest passion.
Thoreau's own pond was bounded by the railroad, punctuated
by the telegraph trees, and their alien wires.
All of my dread, and all of my longing
hope that Earth may outwit the huge stupidity of its humans,
can find their signs and portents
here, their recapitulation of joy and awe.
This fine, incised two inches of goldsmith work
just drifted down can speak as well
for tree as 1,000 forest acres.
And tree means depth of roots, of risen height, outreaching
branches.
This musical speech of wavelets joust against reeds,
as a boat's wake tardily reaches shore,
is voice of the waters, voice of all the blue,
and circling the terrestrial globe, which as a child,
I loved to spin slowly upon its creaking axis.
Blue globe, we have seen now, round, small as an apple,
afloat in the wilderness we name, so casually,
as if we knew it, or ever could know it, space."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]