The first time you saw him, plain as day,
did flares erupt and hurl charged particles?
Did earth’s net ease them to the poles and green,
white, red-fringed, blue auroras bloom?
In that hot, ordinary light, you both
walked easily toward one another. Two fields
pulled, meshed, interlocked.
Now he insists upon your bodily attention,
guides you through a filter like grayed glass
past smoky spheres. To seething granulations
on the sun, to dark spots edged
with glowing veins, to prominences quiet
or surging up and looping back. To cool
coronal rains. Tongues and tendrils
jetting from our meager star may spark a storm
in the geomagnetic lattice, may disrupt
radio’s web of words, or powerlines
by which we flourish. No worse. They do
not tug—as stronger star-winds might—distorting
orbits, tearing planets into rocks
that spiral inward, plunge, are
lost. As you blink, remember
that first time, and times to come. Think how
convection stirs to keep a sun alive,
how great arcs dance and keep their bold designs.
How furious atoms fuse or, smashed, escape
gravitational collapse. How massed
desire may someday plumb sun’s core,
burn out, go nova, and cast off all flesh.
BY
EARTHLIGHT, BY COMET FLARE
Suppose you stood upon the moon, and turned
your head to contemplate with grievous joy
the streaky sapphire globe you’d left behind
and, shuddering at this glimpse of terrestrial glory,
saw beyond a sullen plain of dust
his ashen figure: light unscattered now
by air’s illusions would reveal at last
the dull euphorias of his cherished woe.
If in that moment of illumination
one sun-grazing comet struck its flame
at brilliant perihelion, could the hot
reversal bring a further transformation?
And might he by that newer light become—
as dirty ice burns clean—what he is not?
SETTING COURSE FOR THE HELIOPAUSE
Out where the solar wind gives out, beyond
the farthest planet, your widespread sails’ desire
collapses. Or, it would. The bodiless ice
of space would harbor you, if the grave bonds
that hold you here let go, if you were hurled,
fantastic clipper pushed by protean streams,
past the heliosphere. As in a dream,
you’d leave, released. Like lust, love would furl.
But now you see he’s touched you, in his mind
again. And more than touched. The other word
waits at your lips. You laugh. Your loosed heart stirs.
A whirlpool swirls, wanting’s unwanted stars.
Still you set sail: you’ll sing, where last land grays
in thinnest light, sharp chanteys of slow rage.
THE STARRY MESSAGE
As if it were an illumined book of nature
As if the chart had any meaning but itself
As if these bursts and jets, this cold dark matter, sang
As if they heard our notes, our counterpoint, our words
As if an earthly man could lead her on to something higher
As if the beauty that he sees were real
As if the love of flesh were emblem
As if they might find any gods but entropy
As if the countless asterisms danced upon a pin
As if they knew what any angel knows
APRIL ARGUMENT WITH THE ASTRONOMER
“It’s no tall tale,” she says. “It’s spring.
Give me a fulcrum-moon, fantasy’s flexile lever,
a place to stand, and all the season’s musk. I
will make the earth move.” And he: “That’s silly
Arch-
imedes’ joke. And pathetic sentiment. No, madam,
musk’s delusion. There’s no such lever, only seeds
that push up blind and die to bear another seed.”
Nonetheless, they move. Unreasonably. Come spring,
each moonstruck garden calls to each new Eve and Adam
to turn from cold star-gazing, turn to love or
its hot simile, and rejoice in dwindling dark,
taste nectars gushing out beneath the sky.
“Your Galileo,” she murmurs, “took the risk..” Eye
fixed as much on earth as on the sun that seared
his observant retinas, he conjured up the spiral-arcs
of heliocentric orbits. “Revolutions spring”
(she carries on) “from chance and fancy, lover,
not from careful count and ordering of atoms
once thought indivisible.” Smashed, those very atoms
revealed metaphorical solar systems, and the sky
was mushroom-shadowed. “We must imagine—if we live or
die depends on more than fact. True seers
treasure all that wells, fantastic springs”
(he stares—she’s shouting now) “from the skull’s
odd dark.
And you? Computing wavelengths that the bark
refracts, you miss the forest’s gaudy scents. As Adam
busy with his labeling missed the asp: rings
of words choked pleasure like an airtight husk. I
dream of Eve’s gifts—snaky stories, sex, the seeds
of children—offered apple-sweet. But what you love, or
anyway, attend to, yields a thin, dull savor.
Come.” She smiles. “Beneath that vaporous arch
of unruly lilacs blooming by a cove of cedars,
we’ll play like lunatics or fools at Eve and Adam,
and believe their fable. We’re more than dust, I
tell you, more
than leavings stars have cast. Ring
in the springtime with these bodies made of atoms
from the sky’s far crucibles. And with aetheric seeds
unreasonable Archimedes planted, with his fictive
lever.”
CONSTELLATION: SHE REGARDS AN UNMAPPED SKY
The sky tonight a blank rune, you gaze out
alone as dusk’s grayed dumb-show
takes the stage: the steady cloudy wandering
light of Venus brightest now at eastern elongation,
shifting to its crescent phase, sun’s light
glancing icy from that planet’s yearly ring
to yours. And star by star the other motes
sprinkle, thicken, cluster, visible gravel
cast from heavenly gardens. A treacherous
footing, for all you have determined
to pick your way along that sprawling path.
You only need to learn the names.
Need only fabricate, from glittering
apparent proximities, from scattered streams,
and white irregular eddies, a straight-line
geometry. Redeem them by design.
Look! There’s Lilith’s
Hair, The Twisted Lute,
and Satan’s
Bracelet, problematic al’Gebra,
and Amazonia
with her empty Quiver, the vermilion-
stippled Mango
Nebula—exploded pregnant remnant
of— But you have given over stories, know
that you could make of any three unearthly points
a line. (Excalibur?
The Gods’ Road? Dart
of
Eros?)
Any three. Your old
life dies. Let go,
let go, you mutter. Let go these fears
and all
these
fancies. Open up the book and
and start to learn.
: a star, or galaxy, at twice the distance
recedes at twice the speed. Then is forgiveness
possible? And what requires it? Only
diminishing time. That weakens every force
save entropy. So let the past
attenuate. Let memory be mortal. Know
light brings to you configurations
that no longer are. All you see’s not all—
however strong, however sharp the lens—
but only all within the space traversed
by rays come toward you since that Fiat lux.
(Command, explosion, thought desiring being: to you
it is the same.) And yet, within
the cosmological horizon, if
the mutual pulling of two bodies holds
them tethered, then spirals, disks, the lone
or super-clustered atoms, caught, cannot
expand. So must contract. Now look:
a woman and a man, together, walk in space.
Repairing vision. The focus of one lens
a nerve-twitch, breath’s breadth, flat
is mended with another, that gathers light
to bend it once again. Nimble in their clumsy
garments, reaching with a high-strung arm—
as with mind’s artificial casts through time—
they make the strict adjustments, make a pure
mechanics’ dance through bloodless dark. In faithful
freefall, tumbling on an orbit round
a drop-shape orbiting a sun that winds
its own slow loop around an astral eye
moving ever out from all the others, neighbors,
local group, and far. They do not think
of this. The planet turns, above, below.
Perceptions here directionless, depths loses
depth. They slap hands heavy-gloved. Touch helmets.
Smile. Companionable, they turn, return.
He floats into the shuttle’s hull. She pauses.
Sparse Australia rises overhead.
Rare and perilous, alluring, brushed
by clean lagoons of lucid cloud. No courtship
theirs, but dance of trust and knowledge like
their airless speech. Electrons’ arid pulse,
no more. But now the continent’s throb, the sight
of it: a vacuum-leak, or other force,
to draw her breath away. To leave her dizzied.
The tiny, vast, escaped, familiar world
new-seen. And so, forgiven. She herself
cleansed, blessedly bereft of all earth holds.