I think I'll read this first short trip to Europe,
which is a trip to Palermo before I take you
on the trip to Prague.
The Charting.
Flying to Palermo, I watched the dotted red line plot our course
over the Océano Atlántico, the Monti Appalachi at our backs.
Blanks in the line filling in as we leave the continent,
and climb into the evening that has already left
Milano, but not yet arrived in New York.
Suspended like an instar over Newfoundland
and framing her face.
What time is it here 35,000 feet over the world, hours
after the toasts have been raised in Paris--
sorry hours after the toasts have been raised in Paris.
Hours before they will reach San Francisco.
The turning world, always waiting for something,
always getting over something, the same things
all over the globe.
Baby, at last asleep.
Daddy's shirt tails untucked.
My seatmate collapsed over 2 seats, blanket over her head.
What was that pill she popped as we taxied out of Kennedy,
sleep.
Broken by silent fragments of a film
turning, aching, synthetic diurnal rhythm
of mechanized flight.
I'm a day late because a blizzard hit New England.
Snow starting at dawn, and closing the woods
around my mother's house.
I shoveled the pathway, hauled wood,
and watched the white unfurling.
Four inches at breakfast, 10 inches at lunch,
mid-afternoon, and the whiteness had
muffled the world down to the small circle
at the end of my pen.
Two storms converging off the coast,
spinning together into a galaxy.
Its force canceling everyone's business.
Beautiful, to be subdued by its quiet, where I could only
think about flying to Palermo, and wonder
what my mother at 90, not a woman who welcomes help,
would do alone in a blizzard.
One day, she said, when the dog brought home a rotted deer
carcass, she whacked the meat and bones apart with a hammer,
bagged the remains and drove them to the dump.
I can feel her frustration and her strength,
bemoaning the dog's disgusting habit,
but energized by the task.
And if someone had come along to help her,
all she'd have had-- all she'd have felt is frustration.
That's why she'd rather let the snow pile deep
against the door, while I fly off to--
it doesn't really matter where I've gone.
Palermo, now.
Where boats are out at dawn, past marly cliffs and return
filling crates that line the sidewalk, glittering anchovies,
spiraling periwinkles black, bursting sea urchins,
half moon steaks of swordfish and whole octopus flesh,
white as porcelain, speckled purple as wine,
lifted from the open air pot, and sliced before my eyes.
Oh, the beauty of the customer who
stands at the streetside bar to wait, the winter street
spilling conversation like heat from open doors.
I'm here because 200 years ago, the monk
Piazzi discovered the first known asteroid
and named it Ceres.
His portrait honors the Muse Urania, science owning up then
to its sisterhood with art.
In his observatory, the globe shows North America in sepia
unnamed.
Indian territory and uncharted land.
I'm here because now the charting continues in space.
How many gravity assists does it take to fly past the moon?
And an audience has gathered to hear what poetry
has to say about where we are.
An expert reports that astronomers
consider asteroids vermin.
They clutter space between Mars and Jupiter,
streaking the clarity of stars.
But really, the expert adds, we should consider them friends,
places we can use for staging, land there
and mine them when we go to Mars.
Not my job to put spin on asteroid reputations.
Though they can use it, since one
slammed to Earth, leaving an iridium spike
at the K-T boundary.
Global darkness for a year, and the shrinkage of dinosaurs
into birds.
My job, to argue for beauty not use.
See Galileo's washes of the moon.
See Kepler's somnium.
See Nabokov: I discovered in nature, the non-utilitarian
delights that I sought in art.
My job, to argue for dark skies that make us see stars and say
where oh, night did I come from?
And where-- coded for long distance-- am I going?
My job, to be the lepton thoroughfare that is me,
and the storm, and the stars, and the dark matter that
perforates everything with its missingness.
How to feel whole, knowing you're
shot through with holes made of the inverse of all we know.
Inherent in matter is something unwounded by puncturing.