WEBVTT

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And this poem is called
"The Almost Island."

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I live a block from a park
which is a promontory in Lake

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Washington that until the
1920s, when the level of Lake

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Washington was lowered, because
of the digging of a ship canal

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, it was an island,
just offshore,

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just off the lake shore.

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But it still was an island, and
it still feels a lot like one.

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It's a little over two
miles in circumference,

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and it's got some old woods in
the middle of it, and trails.

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And more than
anything else, that's

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what I moved for, to be
able to spontaneously

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just get up from my desk,
and walk into a place

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that beautiful.

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This poem is called
"The Almost Island."

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"The woods which give
me their silence,

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their ancient Douglas firs,
and red cedars, their ferns,

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are not the wilderness.

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They're contained in the two
mile circumference of an almost

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island, a park in city limits.

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Pleasure boats crowd at
weekends into the small bay.

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The veils hiding the mountain
are not always natural cloud.

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Eagle and heron
speak of solitude,

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but when you emerge
from forest shade,

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the downtown skyline rears
up, phantasmagoric but near,

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across the water.

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Yet the woods, the lake,
the great winged birds,

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the vast mountain at
the horizon, are nature.

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Metonymy of the
spirit's understanding

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knows them to be a concentrate
of all Thoreau or Wordsworth

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knew by that word, nature,
a never failing principle

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of joy and purest passion.

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Thoreau's own pond was bounded
by the railroad, punctuated

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by the telegraph trees,
and their alien wires.

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All of my dread, and
all of my longing

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hope that Earth may outwit the
huge stupidity of its humans,

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can find their
signs and portents

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here, their recapitulation
of joy and awe.

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This fine, incised two
inches of goldsmith work

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just drifted down
can speak as well

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for tree as 1,000 forest acres.

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And tree means depth of roots,
of risen height, outreaching

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branches.

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This musical speech of
wavelets joust against reeds,

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as a boat's wake
tardily reaches shore,

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is voice of the waters,
voice of all the blue,

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and circling the terrestrial
globe, which as a child,

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I loved to spin slowly
upon its creaking axis.

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Blue globe, we have seen now,
round, small as an apple,

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afloat in the wilderness
we name, so casually,

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as if we knew it, or ever
could know it, space."

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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