24 Space poems

The void between galaxies is not actually empty it's full of dark matter of things we can't see but know are there the void is not nothing the void is a kind of full we don't have the instruments for yet

A child climbs into a cardboard house, shuts its doors and windows to hold in the dark, and lies on her back inside, looking up through its cut-out moon and stars. She knows she is not looking at the sky. But she calls out, still, It's nighttime! I'm looking at the sky!

When I was nearly six my father opened his magic doctor bag: two tongue depressors fastened by a rubber band; one flick of his hairy wrist and lo! we invented flight.

A rocket is mostly fuel the payload tiny at the top almost everything burned away just to lift the small thing i think about what i carry what i burn through just to get the small thing where it's going

If you can command these elements to silence … origin : No soul could have spoken of the universe’s origin since no one could have existed to witness it. Origin is ellipsis. We believe the universe began, because we exist and because we can hear the sounds of its origin. Activating radio telescopes, gazing at the far corners of existence so dark and distant that the mewling universe can still be heard and seen cooling in cosmic antiquity, we hear. We hear the origin’s cold weak light journey to us. From our center, we can see nothing beyond the cosmic background radiation’s feeble crackle. Beyond this dark margin, we can hear no more origin. We have run out of the sound of the past. We have used up all our past we may know. Beyond this past, there is only the silence that marks the edge of the infinite. When we deploy a fantasy such as “The West,” what we often mean is specifically that transatlantic network of capitalism that formed our experience of modernity, the economic system that catalyzed the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the British and American orders. The West in this sense possessed its own Big Bang, its own founding from sublime trauma: the expropriation of land from those who lived in the New World and the expropriation of body and labor from those who lived on the African west coast, and the plunder that laid waste to peoples and nations of three continents. And here are also sublime silences. The silent images of the Aztecs’ death, which José Rabasa shows were painted by an artist asked to document their own world’s demise by the Spanish. The silence of the encomienda, blazing silence of Diego de Landa, crackling light of Maya codices and icons arsoned and non-silence of confessions, screams elicited from those he hoisted into air by their wrists and he pelted hot wax at them and he lashed their bodies with whips and they grew non-silent and then silent. And so a continent bared for those moaning boats that stole across ocean stole people across continent crammed in dark belly of ships, these captured people of many tongues who could not speak to each other and who we struck in the lungs with death by drowning people who we abducted to our country people we commanded not to read or write or speak. Such events suggest other silences: first, the silence against appropriation (How can one speak of a suffering that is not one’s own, a suffering whose responsibility one might also own?) and second, the silence of sublime inadequacy (How can one write poetry after the killing of three continents?). One can lodge many answers to these questions, the first of them being moratorium : When early evening came, the Stars descended into the parking lot of the 7-11 where they held congress and declared embargo on speaking of the dead. And dawn came and what we had said about him became sky-silent. dark matter : Because my father had died into an object, I fled my work, my friends, my art, New York. I fled my life so I could also become object. Youmna followed, but these memories are fictional (performance) and so we will drape her with a white cloth. Having fled my life, I am sitting on my bed, operating this memory indoors, underground, in basements, in locked bedrooms, in any indoor container that might further package me away from the fact and still did they pursue, still did they strike the darting arrows of the Death Star, that black radiance of leeches that flung itself down from the hot surfaces of the griefsun. The famishing lines tracked me inside, tracked me around corners, lassoing me into the air. “Where does this black sun come from?” Julia Kristeva asked. “Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?” And this is when Youmna lifted the sheet that had been cast over my body. “Why did you cover yourself like this, like an object at the morgue? What were you thinking?” I said, “I thought what I had covered was the world.” the unsayable : One of the traditional paradoxes of the dead is how they do not emit information. Because the dead do not emit light, which cannot escape the event horizon of the deceased, they can only be detected by the symptoms they leave on the surrounding matter, the haloed matter burning at their corona, the white marks scarring the X-rays. A person can survive within the dead once it has gravitationally collapsed. This happens for only a second from the observer’s eye, but, because of gravitational time dilation, grief 
occurs a nearly infinitely long time for the person who chooses to live inside the dead. tlacuilo, graphic novelist at the world’s end : In those California days after my dad died, I felt the life began to seep out of me into the ground and so I brought my sneakers to the cobbler for resoling, which strangely enough did not mitigate my newfound grief. Sometimes I would find myself gazing out the window at the garden my mom cultivated behind her house, often while performing an Edwardian pose of wan melancholy, and as I approached, the glass would immediately darken as though saturated with an egglike blue shadow. (I later realized this shadow was caused by my head blocking the lamplight and decided to simply lean back.) I found myself stricken with headaches for some reason when I neglected to eat for days. I began laying my head on the carpet as though listening for footsteps, which I did often in those days, perhaps I believed the sun would itself walk inside and incite me, when I saw a woman in my mother’s backyard. I did not recognize her. She crouched on the ground holding what I thought was a knife. 
I thought I saw her carving the earth into sections. As I came closer, 
I saw that what she grasped in her hand was a quill, though she held it with such authority that she looked as though she held the earth by its handle. All the cracks that scrawled between the grass—I saw that these were not cracks. They were sketches. And what a strange thing, looking back on it, how I never wondered what this woman was doing in my mother’s backyard. She glanced up at me as I approached and said, “Everyone I know is dead. I am also dead, but someone must stay behind and document my death. I am the only archivist, so I remain suspended between death and history.” I realized what was occurring and asked, selfishly, “So it’s possible to talk to someone who is dead?” “You do it all the time. It’s like what Youmna told you to write into your eulogy.” “Yeah, okay.” I paused. “But he never remembers to talk back to me.” She took out two cubes, possibly carved from bone, and threw them at my feet. “What’s that for?” I kneeled closer to her. “Is this fortune telling?” “It’s your stats and hit points.” I laughed. “You’re sending me into a dungeon?” “No,” she said. “You are going on a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage to hell.” initiation : To prepare for your descent (for there was no question of which direction you would eventually end up), you began your initiation into three domains of sorcery: the silent vows of grief; the generative magics obtained through meditation upon the colonial archive; and apprenticeship into all manner of low-level 
magics, including wonder-making, liberating demons, clairvoyance of the past, fierce activities, special jumping abilities, control over the three worlds, abridgment of one’s own lifespan through nicotine inhalation, research methods, the augmentation of merit and pleasure by generating poetry using your body, red optic blasts, melancholy of the spleen, a frequent customer stamp card for Woorijip Korean deli. Your first prophesied guru was the Tlacuilo, the woman historian who had ventured to the underworld by standing witness at the end of the Mexica and the cosmogony of the New World. She had painted omens of the future that now served you as diagrams of the past: the two-headed man who presented his body to Moctezuma, the comet whose banner waved across the sky and heralded the origin of the next kingdom, and the pale ghosts in steel skins who came as gods and guests, the ghosts who at the Festival of  Toxcatl came to kill us. One of them sawed off a man’s head, another speared the eye of a warrior who was betrothed to your sister. The Tlacuilo led you to the black lake that Mexico City had become. You did not know if you were in a fantasy or the past. You were in a fantasy and the past. Small skiffs wobbled by, as did wounded bodies that dyed the waters red. Surrounded by corpses levitating upon the waters, she taught you the first sorcery, that of death’s erasure. She cut off the hole of your mouth so you could say nothing, nothing commensurate with death, nothing can be commensurate to that dark infinity, and so you lost no breaths and so you followed her from the shores (sores) and the waterline slowly became the horizon line of the sky and you could breathe. White fish flew by, gliding without effort. You looked one in the eye and it sucked its cow lips silently at you. She said that this was Atlantis or one of many Atlantises and you saw yourself walking beside her on a road towards an underwater city that you could see only as a speck in the far distance. You tripped on the body of a dead man, seemingly Chinese, his body weighed down with rock-filled bags. The Tlacuilo, who by this time walked far in front of you, came back and told you this man’s name but asked you to stay silent. She led you about a mile further down the road towards the first station set aside for pilgrims such as yourself. Here she transmitted another teaching. There will also be other ages after this one, she said. Other suns will rise and fall. I will instruct you towards the attainment of a new title: The Cowerer from the Sun. She taught you how to crawl on the seabed, a weeping hog crawling on hands and knees. My final teaching is this: Go in fear of the sun. Having said this, she set her own body down in a fetal position and waited for the seaweed to smother her. liberating the sun demon spell : Moneyed sun of vampiric Western powers Lift up enclosures, colonies, and bowers The civilizing light of the Atlantic state’s sun Radiance of iPhones and global financialization I shun you in this wrathful manifestation Glutton sun, I call your name of power Call you out from enclosure, colony, and bower Sun I name you: Radioactive Liquid Ocean of interests and incentives Shipping lanes for slave and spice and coolie Inescapable moisture of air and the body Marinating us all complicit quandary spell : If we are all complicit in the sun’s radiance or if the sun is too sublime to be rolled from its central solar spot, then what is the objective of being revolting to that star? middle fantasy flight of passage : You served as sentry incompetent, standing watch standing for pre-American seabeds for centuries, so slow did you live below the waters, you saw the ocean as simply a second more infinite air. The water’s lip became that line that separates sky from celestial space. One day you spied a person flying, prone. He wafted down and you saw a man starved to skull sick and struggling in the sky, descending through the red gulps of sharks. You saw him fall five fathoms, an ariel who found his free wings stripped and him imagined into caliban. Shining anglerfish for flashlight, you saw that he died silently before he touched down upon the seabed. Of course he had not flown. He had drowned. Your mouth stricken. You could say nothing. You could think nothing commensurate with these absolutes. Poor souls, they perished. Had I been any god of power, I would Have sunk the sea within the earth Engraving by Gustave Doré for the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. influence : If influence spoken by Spenser portends the star’s fateful persuasion, flowing and fluctuating, does influenza mean the disease of fate? the stars : Migrant to death’s second nation, Dante / emerges into the purging state and gazes up / at a supernal cross: four stars joyous, / isomorphs to the four cardinal virtues. “Dante is no bookkeeper of the literal ... [The] constellations are best taken as allegorical.” Although one of the largest star radii observed belongs to the glowering red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, that terrible and sublime throne whose dominion could swallow our own sun nine billion times, poor yellow pebble celestial, and whose own death slain by nova during that final day shall illumine our infinite interior caverns of night — we might also regard Canis Majoris’s gigantism as hypothetical: though massive, this hypergiant is a thousand times more diffuse than air. The size of this terrorful star depends on what words we wield to define its stellar radius (e.g., whether by density or optical-depth). You can shrink the most sublime of stars using only your language.Vaporware star, luminosity leached of borders, you are all fictions. human song : Perhaps it is the case that you never get over things. You decide you will no longer engage with them. You answer with 
silence until you are reminded once again of the wound and requested 
to be human. poem written after slingshotting around the sun to the future when you too are a father : Perfect baby perched on high chair, washed and newly diapered, photogenic but on Facebook unshared, I wonder the purpose of the personal in death or politics, the former displacing one’s personality into a mute purgatory perpetual, the latter being a plural affair, more systemic and dispersed than private feelings — but do these secret fruits grow and burrow inside your grief, growing riper until they burst into black sweetness? Is the point not the immolation of the person but their muteness, their non-divulgence? You point to the window. You show your child the snow outside. The snow’s white war against the world. The snow that has so superbly coated only the tops of branches with erasure. Sometimes it is through the hidden underside that we find ourselves most bare.

When, in the science museum, I arrive at the overview of our galaxy, with its tiny arrow pointing to You are here (which really ought to be We are here), and see that the two to four hundred billion stars of our local cluster are drifting or chasing or dreaming after each other in circles within milky circles, I can’t help but think of those ancient paintings and rock engravings, discovered all over our celestial body, of that one line which begins at whatever point it can, then curls outward, or inward, toward nothing anyone can define—the oldest shape revered by Aborigine and Celt, by mathematician and engineer and Burning Man reveler alike, and even accorded a place of honor among the mess of thoughts on my desk, as a nifty paper clip of copper. But it’s already there in the florets of the sunflower crisscrossing with the precision of a logarithm, and in the pin-wheel shape of the Nautilus shell, and in the coiling neurons of the cochlea that let us tell Art Tatum from a three year old’s improvisation. Call it what you will—“God's fingerprint,” “the soul unfolding through time,” “the passageway into the Self”— I can’t help but admire, even fear, something as mundane as a flush of the toilet, when its swirling is a variation on our sidereal drift, our existential pain. And then there’s that famous falcon, “turning and turning in a widening gyre,” a portentous symbol of our own circling into some dread, some pernicious chaos we thought we had just escaped, one town burning a decade behind us, a millennium before that, and into next week, next year, next whenever. And when the two of us took that winding road an infinity of others had wound down before us and would wind down again, our spirits hushed by the crosses and bouquets at each dead man’s curve and just burning in the dry heat to touch each other, wasn’t that a wondrous and terrible turning?

U p beyond the N ight sky, an I ndigo darkness like V elvet E mbraces the farthest R eaches of the mind, S un, moon, stars, E verything.

The first track still almost swings. High hat and snare, even A few bars of sax the stratosphere will singe-out soon enough. Synthesized strings. Then something like cellophane Breaking in as if snagged to a shoe. Crinkle and drag. White noise, Black noise. What must be voices bob up, then drop, like metal shavings In molasses. So much for us. So much for the flags we bored Into planets dry as chalk, for the tin cans we filled with fire And rode like cowboys into all we tried to tame. Listen: The dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming, Marbled with static like gristly meat. A chorus of engines churns. Silence taunts: a dare. Everything that disappears Disappears as if returning somewhere.

Death is coming and you must build a starship to take you to Venus. Make it from a catsup bottle, a flashlight coil, a penny, the cat’s bell, Mom’s charm bracelet. They say that planet is torment, whipped by circular wind, choked in vitriol clouds. But no. When you get there it is a light in the sky and I am with you. If you find nothing else, borrow the pleated wing of a winter moth, lighter than dust.

The first space shuttle launch got delayed until Sunday, so we had to watch the shuttle’s return to Earth in class instead—PS113’s paunchy black & white rolled in, the antennae on top adjusted sideways & down for better reception. That same day, Garrett stole my new pencil box. That same day, Cynthia peed her jeans instead of going to the bathroom & letting Garrett steal her pencil box. Both of us too upset to answer questions about space flight, so we got sent to the back of the class. I smelled like the kind of shame that starts a fight on a Tuesday afternoon. Cynthia smelled like pee & everyday Jordache. The shuttle made its slick way back to Earth, peeling clouds from the monochromatic sky & we all—even the astronomically marginal— were winners. American, because a few days before, a failed songwriter put a bullet in the president in the name of Jodie Foster. The shuttle looked like a bullet, only with wings & a cockpit, & when it finally landed, the class broke into applause & the teacher snatched a thinning American flag from the corner, waved it back & forth in honor of our wounded president & those astronauts.