Poetry
Issue #10
Planetarium
Reveal Pegasi Andromeda Pho Cassiopeia Perseus,
Enter, Gravity. Trace footsteps through planet-heavy skies:
scatter a path with topaz, shimmering against a depth of black
in which blackness retreats, so you are able to take the same path in reverse.
Flightless birds. Praise moons ensnared in lattice, hauled ashore,
graphite-muscle taut, resisting fabric.
See them as they are for what they are not.
Endure invasions of their majesty
for with the findings we judge the planets' art afresh.
Substitute all you learn with all they see:
incalculable trajectories, the stillness of reeds on a lakeshore
Infrared orbs -handspans apart - orbit and shift
as comets and asteroids comb the pixel-dome.
Where my feet had stood, another now stands:
the Planetarium advocates such renewal.
Terrestrial words of largeness miscarry; planets grow bigger, spill
into undiscovered fissures.
Steeped in incandescent Mars' crystallised oceans, I am free of mechanisms of
quantifying time, making tangible the impossible, welcoming the universal.
If Earth is an extension of myself, are the places I am yet to go body parts I can't name?
I feel the absence of your hand in mine:
it seems apt that I should lose you in the vastness of space, against all that sky.
I search for you, but there are hundreds like you, who would kiss me from coral reef floors to mountain summits.
Universe. You are bottles spinning perpetually,
diamonds excavated from gold mines, lunar nymphets pined after by adrift mariners;
Solar Masses, if I could harvest your reserves, I would.
There is an illusion at the heart of this performance -
for are we not asking the planets to perform? - of which the theatre,
with its domed facade and tiered rows, and participants, gazing, wondering, are part. That is, to bring something closer is to confess insurmountable distance.
Joshua Lingard
© 2014