Paul Hellyer was flying around the world trying

to keep our weapons out of space, wanted

his grandchildren to have place they could grow

a garden, didn’t want them to look at the moon

and see a man’s face.

Paul Hellyer asks us to stretch our minds

wide enough to see our solar system

is only a dot inside of a dot inside of a dot.

The Milky Way is one of nine-hundred-billion

atoms in a grain of sand on the beach

of the universe. I believe Paul Hellyer

because I’ve seen some magic in my life—

and not all of it is from here, this curveball

of a planet we are so convinced cannot be hit.

We call the weather beautiful

because there are no more snowmen in Colorado,

but there are men with cold hearts

who buy stock in hurricanes and tsunamis.

Who buy stock in war and cancer

and poverty. Who buy stock

in extinction. Whenever I wake up

thinking: No one is going to win

the human race—we are all going

to lose unless something changes soon,

I give myself space.

I remember the most effective remedy

for my depression is being told I am not alone.

And I know we are not alone

better than Pythagoras knew the earth

wasn’t flat. Knew you couldn’t walk to the edge

of it and fall off. Go far enough

and you simply run into something

you couldn’t imagine existed—

the coral reefs, or the lavender fields

of France, or the bayous of Louisiana

at dusk, or the lone aspen tree that’s right now

tapping on my living room window,

its autumn leaves blinking

like two thousand yellow lights

begging me to slow down

and know the truth is a planet

we haven’t discovered yet.

But it has discovered us.

Someone tells me Paul Hellyer has gone off

the deep end—but is the shallow end

where I’m meant to stay?

What does it mean to be grounded in reality?

How many senses have I had to shut down

to have common sense?

I don’t want my sense to be common,

to pace a cubicle of conditioning—my dreams

limited to a nap, my consciousness

sold to the same folks buying extinction.

I don’t know how to save the world,

but questions themselves are telescopes.

I know there is medicine in knowing

how much we don’t know. I know

there are answers in being awestruck.

I know someone, somewhere,

is pointing to a speck of light

that is our tiny blue planet

and saying, I bet

that planet is capable

of sustaining life.

And for now, they’d be right.

HOW I BECAME A POET

Fifth grade, basketball tryouts.

Me—the tiniest kid in my class,

haircut so strange I looked

like a third-grade boy who got picked on

by his first-grade brother.

Sprinting from the sideline

to center court, I fell down

two times—because planes can’t fly

with the pilot’s eyes on the wings,

and I couldn’t run

without staring at my shoes,