LITMIR.BIZ

      MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS

      1.

      We like to think of it as parallel to what we know,

      Only bigger. One man against the authorities.

      Or one man against a city of zombies. One man

      Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand

      The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants

      Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.

      Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,

      This message going out to all of space.…Though

      Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent,

      Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics

      Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine

      A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

      Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,

      Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing

      To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best

      While the father storms through adjacent rooms

      Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,

      Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.

      Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.

      All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils

      In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.

      The books have lived here all along, belonging

      For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence

      Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,

      A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.

      2.

      Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once

      [politely.

      A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time,

      He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.

      Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in,

      Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture,

      Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires

      Charcoals out below. He’ll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don’t.

      I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back.

      That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.

      Hero, survivor, God’s right hand man, I know he sees the blank

      Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.

      He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,

      Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth And:

      May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.

      Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.

      A fountain in the neighbor’s yard babbles to itself, and the night air

      Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.

       We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth

      Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone

      One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.

      Our eyes adjust to the dark.

      3.

      Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,

      That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—

      When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,

      Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel

      Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

      Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,

      Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones

      At whatever are their moons. They live wondering

      If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,

      And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.

      Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

      Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

      At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

      Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want it to be

      One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

      Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

      And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

      Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

      So that I might be sitting now beside my father

      As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe

      For the first time in the winter of 1959.

      4.

      In those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001

      When Dave is whisked into the center of space,

      Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light

      Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid

      For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,

      Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,

      Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent

      And vague, swirls in, and on and on….

      In those last scenes, as he floats

      Above Jupiter’s vast canyons and seas,

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