University Place

cc

APPLAUSE

>> Thank you to the Academy and to all of you for being here. I've brought five poems to read. Though, I had to scuttle the one about the traveling salesman problem and the one about my love moving into the house with his seven canoes and kayaks for a necessary few celebrating the Wisconsin landscape that we love and share. I'll begin with one about cognitive science and climate change, a metaphor with great powers of mapping. "The Gorilla That Walks Through the Basketball Game." Thirty professors at the chaos talk on how the mind works, we watch the white-shirted players on the video screen, doing our assigned job of counting the number of passes they make, not so easy when two different balls have appeared in play, and our counts at the end of the video clip vary- eleven say some, fourteen insist others- but we're feeling good that we've kept our eyes on the balls and the hands and the backs, carried out our appointed task, and when we're asked if we noticed anything odd, no one nods; though shown the replay we see we've missed the gorilla that wanders through the twist of bodies, crossing the court from left to right in a leisurely way, looking about with curiosity- leaving us shaken by the query of what else we've missed in our lives keeping our eyes on the ball.

APPLAUSE

"The Wisconsin landscape." This is an annual event in the Arboretum that we were lucky enough to be in presence for. Teal pond, May fourth Dear ones We're walking the wood trail toward a cacophony of chorus trills And all around us the dust stirs and jumps With modeled brown bodies moving toward the sound of the males Calling from the pond Leaping across our path toward the water Following, we come up on the heaving revels of American toads The day of the full moon Mating in promiscuous piles in the cold, brown water Males clasped around females Mating and singing their blue ballooned throats out And leaping in the fertile water on a day when the pull of warmth And sun and moon have told them to go forth and multiply That toads not be lost to this world And here from A Spring in the Brooklyn Prairie, "Wild Plum." Wet meadow, dry hill, the black burnt stubs of broom grass, Queen Anne's lace and thistle stalks; we space the bushel bags of chaff and seed- grass or forbs- every fifty yards, fill our pails, sow this new burn on the Ice Age Trail. Wind winnows straw and dust from the flung harvest threshed at Hook Lake prairie. Dun and yellow seeds speckle ash

as we criss-cross the acres

these will be scarified in winter ice, loosen in spring to root as prairie smoke, yellow puccoon, rough blazing star, spiderwort, turkeyfoot and little bluestem- a hundred more. We grow prickly with straw-filled mouths and hair, teary-eyed with dust, work steadily onto the song of flickers, magnolia warblers passing through, the early spring perfume of the wild plum hedgerow in massed white bloom. And here, in one of those kayaks with my Wisconsin love on a six-day trip through the mangrove trails of the Florida Everglades. "At Night in the Everglades." Perhaps the moon's absence called us out. or the sky itself, empty of city lights and full of stars- as, camped on the chickee with water surrounding us on every side, we woke to find the bay entirely still, a glass, reflecting underfoot even the littlest stars of the clear sky overhead, so that we stood in a world made entirely of stars wheeling under our feet and above our heads, naked, in the original world; only a dolphin's fin traced a wavery line across the Milky Way. And this last, with friends on the Wisconsin River. "A Labor Day Sunday in a Canoe." One Hundred White Pelicans. Over Wyalusing, riding thermals, they shine and disappear, vanish like thought, re-emerge stacked, stretched, a drifting fireworks' burst. We can't stop looking up from paddling, imagining how high they must be to look so tiny, flecks of light. Battling against headwind, the thrill to see- we think we see- their third dimension of effortless life, scattershot, high in the blue sky, turning in sun- white, silver, ash, gone, how we could ride, carried on rising currents of air, wide view, steadily accompanied. As they are. And on the river's back, we too. Thanks.

APPLAUSE