When you come home

Crew members of U.S. Champlain cheer arrival of Astronaut Alan Shepard. Image credit: NASA (from the JSC Digital Image Collection)

absurd light in silence

Text from an old Sir Walter Scott novel redacted into a poem. Photo at right is a sunset on Mars taken by the Mars rover Spirit in 2005. Image credit: Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Texas A&M, Cornell, JPL, NASA.

Optimism

Image of Gordon Cooper in Project Mercury suit. Image credit: NASA.

Change your spot on the map

Cut text from old NASA mission transcripts pasted onto an illustration from “Smith’s Illustrated Astronomy.”

The Local Merger

Cut text from the 1910 “The Galaxy: A Magazine of Literature, Volume 3, Issue 10” pasted onto kimono fabric graphic.

Let’s go for a creek walk

Image of Titan’s surface taken by the Huygens probe on January 14, 2005. Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Let’s go for a creek walk
you and I
and skip rocks across
the methane

and maybe we could picnic
in a spot with a view
of the etherized sun

that might as well be
sunset on a foggy beach
back home.

Let’s go for a creek walk
you and I
and turn over some rocks
that are not
gneiss, schist, or quartz.

but leave the bucket behind.
I’m not expecting to find crawfish
this time.

I’ve walked a lot of creeks
in my life

some with fast water
some with slow
some with no

and trust me

we need to check this one out.

Blue stragglers

APOD for April 9, 2012, “Blue Straggler Stars in Globular Cluster M53.” Image credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA

They are vagabonds,
rebels,
as stars go.

Refusing to sit still
and age to red

they wander off script

and siphon some beauty
off a binary companion.

The light touch-up
works.

In pictures,
they look FAB-U-LOUS

bluer
and seemingly younger than their peers

though anyone who reads
the cautionary label on the product knows

they’re burning out
faster.

I am not an idle dreamer

Sometimes we wake
to find that we are
Atlas

or a passive turtle

holding everything in place
as we’ve been told

slow, steady
guardians.

Eons pass,
and if we wake again,
it is only to shift the weight
on our back
on our shell.

I say

end the sleeping.

Let our fingertips bleed
from all the pushing up.

I am on Earth right now / I am NOT on Earth right now (a diptych)

The phrase “I am on Earth right now” comes from NASA’s “Global Selfie” initiative for Earth Day today. Underlying image to the left was taken by the Juno spacecraft. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems). Underlying image to the right is from an old out-of-print work.  The diptych “hinge” was created from photos of the ISS’s solar array.
I am indebted to Dr. David Grinspoon for proposing “I am not on Earth right now” as a counterpoint. Without his insight, this piece would not have been born.

 

After the Awful Silence

Background is a raw image (i.e., uncalibrated and unvalidated) by Cassini; the intended image target was Atlas. Image credit: Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Text used to build poem was borrowed from John Goad’s 1699 “Astro-Meteorologica.”