Temenos
They’re taking me to a distant planet.
I, scarfed and sweatered
in the chill of the ship, smiling
as the old do, apotropaically:
they, everything that can be hoped
from the young of any era:
competent, deferential.
“No one has ever worn
the human form as well as they … ” (But where did
*that come from? I mean, what book
stamped it on eternity
before it fell into the real?)
I lecture, twice weekly. Shape
thereby the ineradicable
hum; the absence,
beyond the hydroponics deck, of green.
They in their easygoing
uniforms and discipline; I,
frankly, wandering, through worlds
tangential to their orders – alien
to any meaning they might give to “worlds.”
Afterwards, rare lieutenants
of both sexes confess
to dreams or metaphysics; the rest find me “interesting.”
Alone, I watch the stars
that scrape my mind to canvas
when I think where I am, or not.
Look away, invent wonder,
practice impassive reflection,
pretend that ghostly outline contains stars;
recall the window of a city bus
on a winter night, my old flat
that looked out on walls, or the face of our captain:
busy, with no doubt
where we are as, entering hyperspace,
the dots become dashes, and all cues are lost.
I know why I’m here. You’d think
I know why I’m here,
and that I should prepare,
talk, brainstorm with scientists …
Instead the metal walls, gray plastic dots
of the floor, aforementioned
hum, and the strange light, strange
because it tries to replicate
the sun, draw me in,
like our passing neighbors the black holes.
I’m old, and always afraid,
and must make that the reason I am here.
At last in orbit. And four,
count them, feelings
beneath professionalism: awe
at the archetype – no, the Grail:
a blue and brown and cloud-wrapped ball,
a covenant that anything, toxic waste,
overbreeding, can be healed, i.e., forgotten …
An ancient anger that no lights but ours
shine anywhere. Embarrassment,
remembering that may be no longer true –
they’ve “found something” … which
in turn becomes a secret disappointment.
Then we land, and they bear me –
predictably brooding, inattentive –
towards the place they’ve found, the thing.
I watch the constant mountainous chart
of my own pulse and breath, and wonder:
If we fall to some virus, and I –
mysteriously, briefly saved – claw
my way to the coordinates,
will I see my own life,
no more than that, till it and I
go dark, apparently not worth
the effort of some alien to ponder?
Will it be the temple of a functioning
god, who with the irony
inseparable from power asks,
“*Do you want to know why there’s no one here
or anywhere? Do you really want to know?*”
Compelling me to cherish more
the uniforms around me, and my own rags …
Or is it only the rising land
we cross, with black infinity
stirred in the soup of sky and poured
into the cup of mountains, with something
hovering around them, perhaps a bird?
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