"It starts, 'Shine on Vegas and Wall Street/Place your bets,"' she said. "You could write a thousand verses. 'Shine on the dazzling darkness that mends us when we sleep/Shine on what we throw away and what we keep.' I have written about 60 different verses and rhyming couplets to this thing, and I've kept 12. Are they the best ones? I don't know. I could write 60 a week. What are the 12 most important things to illuminate? It's overwhelming."

She continued into the wee hours of the night, musing about her relationship with the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1964 but with whom she was happily reunited 10 years ago, and about the shift from personal writing to her broader ecological-political-theological ruminations. On "If I Had a Heart, I'd Cry," one of the songs she used in the ballet, she sings, "Holy Earth/How can we heal you/We cover you like blight/Strange Birds of Appetite/If I had a heart/I'd cry." I asked her to replay me the song a few times. It is one of the most haunting melodies she has ever written.

"During that song," she explained, "there are seven night photographs of the Earth from every angle, and when you see it, it's frightening to witness what an electronic blight we are at night."

There was an electronic blight as she drove me back to my hotel at 5 a.m. in her Lexus, with her Jack Russell terrier, Coco, perched on her lap. The block had lost its electricity, as if on cue after a night of dire ecological warnings.

"My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species," she said. "I can't cry about it. In a way I'm inoculated. I've suffered this pain for so long. We were expelled from Eden. What keeps us out of Eden?" She thought about this for a moment before riffing on a Dylan line: "I tried to tell everybody, but I could not get it across."

"Well, I'm being more specific now," she allowed. "The West has packed the whole world on a runaway train. We are on the road to extincting ourselves as a species. That's what I meant when I said that we've got to get ourselves back to the garden."

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David Yaffe is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University and the author of "Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing" (Princeton).