This poem is called A Science Fiction, mostly
because someone once told me, oh, poets
can't write science fiction.
And I said, yes, we can.
A Science Fiction for Ursula K. LeGuin.
When the sun rose, it was smaller than in my dream.
I had been asleep for what felt a long time
and woke confused and claustrophobic.
The texture of sky still magnetized me.
A desert bright day, but the light
is streaked like too much everything pulled
to the edges of a window in storm.
What little of me exists as aperture.
I wanted so little for my birthday.
A moment's peace on a hill.
And where did that get me?
Into the stars themselves?
To hitch myself to a salvage run, 13 years round trip?
A distress signal, a freighter the company had written off
the summer I learned to kiss a girl
until she shook with desire, when the engines fired
no one thought to think, could even
know this uncharted singularity.
At night on Earth, I am all of Orion.
At night on Earth, I fell tangential
into a puddle of cold rain and rippled the muddy reflection
of new Chicago--
blurred its confusion into circuit and solder.
This is what I can expect.
Gravity, density, volume dissipating.
I am all at once.
I studied all night for an exam I wouldn't pass,
slept through a snowfall that piled itself upon itself.
Death isn't the door you would expect, isn't a carriage kindly
stopping.
I celebrated my birthday on a science rig
surveying a binary system.
The galley scrounged up cake and candle.
I wished myself into consciousness.
Proximity alarms should be blaring,
but sound is stretched to color, color
stitched to light, light solidifying
to absence, absent the sequence.
So that poem plays with the idea of what it might be.
Stephen Hawking's theorized about it,
so we're all over there, Neil deGrasse Tyson
about what might happen if a human being wherever pulled
into a black hole, so I play around
with their ideas in that piece.