Home. I've been reading lots of Lem.


Time and Space

Deep space. The oblong, twinkleless stars
matte as wax pears. And the astronauts are losing heart,
the heady lisp of auricle and ventricle
fading to a whisper, as muscles shrink to infants' hearts,
or the plum-shaped nubs of swans.
Atrophy, from time in space, even as the space in time
contracts. And how much safer it was —
ascension — at some earlier contraction, each flyer intact,

cupped by a room-size celestial globe
staked to a palace lawn. How much easier, to duck
with the doublets and powdered wigs
through the flap of a trap door and watch on a soot-stained
copper sky the painted constellations, or,
dead-center, a fist of shadowed earth dangling from a ribbon.

All systems go, of course: each moist,
diminishing heart, just sufficient at its terminus to fuel
the arm, the opening hand, to coax
to the lips a fig or pleated straw. Still, how much easier
to drift in a hollow globe, its perpetual
tallow-lit night, while outside with the mazes and spaniels

the day, like an onion, arced up in layers
to the dark heavens. How much safer to enter a time, a space,
when a swan might lift from a palace pond
to cross for an instant — above, below — its outstretched
Cygnus shape, just a membrane
and membrane away. A space in time when such accident
was prophecy, and such singular alignment —
carbon, shadow, membrane, flight — sufficient for the moment.


-- Linda Bierds


Oracle

Because the burn's unstable, burning too hot
in the liquid hydrogen suction line
and so causing vortices in the rocket fuel

flaming hotter and hotter as the "big boy"
blasts off, crawling painfully slowly
up the blank sky, then, when he blinks

exploding white hot against his wincing
retina, the fireball's corona searing
in his brain, he drives with wife and sons

the twisting road at dawn to help with the Saturday
test his division's working on: the crowd
of engineers surrounding a pit dug in snow

seeming talky, joky men for 6 A.M., masking
their tension, hoping the booster rocket's
solid fuel will burn more evenly than the liquid

and keep the company from layoffs rumored
during recess, though pride in making
chemicals do just what they're calculated to

also keys them up as they lounge behind
pink caution tape sagging inertly
in the morning calm: in the backseat, I kick

my twin brother's shin, bored at 6:10 A.M.
until Dad turns to us and says, in a neutral tone,
Stop it, stop it now, and we stop and watch:

a plaque of heat, a roar like a diesel blasting
in your ear, heatwaves ricocheting off gray mist
melting backward into dawn, shockwaves rippling

to grip the car and shake us gently, flame
dimly seen like flame inside the brain confused
by a father who promises pancakes after,

who's visibly elated to see the blast shoot
arabesques of mud and grit fountaining up
from the snow-fringed hole mottling to black slag

fired to ruts and cracks like a parched streambed.
Deliriously sleepy, what were those flames doing
mixed up with blueberry pancakes, imaginings of honey

dripping and strawberry syrup or waffles,
maybe, corrugated like that earth, or a stack
of half-dollars drenched and sticky . . . ?

My father's gentle smile and nodding head—
gone ten years, and still I see him climbing
slick concrete steps as if emerging from our next-door

neighbor's bomb shelter, his long-chilled shade
feeling sunlight on backs of hands, warmth on cheeks,
the brightness making eyes blink and blink . . .

so like his expression when a friend came
to say goodbye to him shrunken inside
himself as into a miles-deep bunker . . .

and then he smiled, his white goatee
flexing, his parched lips cracked but welcoming
as he took that friend's hand and held it, held it

and pressed it to his cheek . . . The scales, weighing
one man's death and his son's grief against
a city's char and flare, blast-furnace heat melting

to slag whatever is there, then not there—
doesn't seesaw to a balance, but keeps shifting,
shifting . . . nor does it suffice to make simple

correspondences between bunkers and one man's
isolation inside his death, a death
he died at home and chose . . . at least insofar

as death allows anyone a choice, for what
can you say to someone whose father or mother
crossing the street at random, or running

for cover finds the air sucked out
of them in a vacuum of fire calibrated
in silence in a man's brain like my father's

—the numbers calculated inside the engineer's
imagination become a shadowy gesture as in Leonardo's
drawing of a mortar I once showed my father

and that we admired for its precision, shot raining
down over fortress walls in spray softly pattering,
hailing down shrapnel like the fountain of Trevi

perfectly uniform, lulling to the ear and eye
until it takes shape in the unforgiving
three dimensional, as when the fragile,

antagonized, antagonistic human face
begins to slacken into death as in my own
father's face, a truly gentle man except

for his work which was conducted gently too—
since "technicals" like him were too shy for sales
or management, and what angers he may have had

seemed to be turned inward against judging
others so the noise inside his head was quieter
than most and made him, to those who knew him well,

not many, but by what they told me after he died,
the least judgmental person
they'd ever known—who, at his almost next to last

breath, uncomplaining, said to his son's
straining, over-eager solicitation,
—Is there something you need, anything?

—That picture—straighten it . . . his face smoothing
to a slate onto which light scribbles what? a dark joke,
an elegant equation, a garbled oracle?


-- Tom Sleigh

Thirty. Maine! Lem Stanislaw and I afield ever more nor'east.


What things for dream there are when spectre-like,
Moving among tall haycocks lightly piled,
I enter alone upon the stubble field,
From which the laborers’ voices late have died,
And in the antiphony of afterglow
And rising full moon, sit me down
Upon the full moon’s side of the first haycock
And lose myself amid so many alike.

I dream upon the opposing lights of the hour,
Preventing shadow until the moon prevail;
I dream upon the night-hawks peopling heaven,
Each circling each with vague unearthly cry,
Or plunging headlong with fierce twang afar;
And on the bat’s mute antics, who would seem
Dimly to have made out my secret place,
Only to lose it when he pirouettes,
And seek it endlessly with purblind haste;
On the last swallow’s sweep; and on the rasp
In the abyss of odor and rustle at my back,
That, silenced by my advent, finds once more,
After an interval, his instrument,
And tries once—twice—and thrice if I be there;
And on the worn book of old-golden song
I brought not here to read, it seems, but hold
And freshen in this air of withering sweetness;
But on the memory of one absent most,
For whom these lines when they shall greet her eye.

-- Frost