Exploring Comets by Steven Hendrix (I AM STILL WAITING Series)

Exploring Comets
by Steven Hendrix

We talked a lot about comets in 1986,
The year Halley’s comet made its appearance,
As it did every 76 years,
We talked about the Challenger astronauts
And their mission to observe the comet
And report back,
We talked about Mark Twain,
How he said he’d come in with Halley’s Comet
And he’d go out with it,
And then he did.

My parents took me outside on the ideal day
To see the comet pass
The street was lined with observers
Some shouting that they saw it
My dad put me on his shoulders
As though being four feet closer to the sky
Gave me a better chance of spotting it.
I saw nothing through the streetlights
But something moved me almost to tears
Knowing the invisible comet was overhead,
That I was somehow connected to it
And that if I were even closer to the sky
I could reach out and grab its tail
And journey through the mystery of the universe.

And now I think of comets again,
Without having given much thought
To them since childhood,
As though they were some child’s plaything,
I think of them again
Because it occurs to me
Comets are much like the soul
Floating alone through cold, dark space
Before blazing across the theater of the sky
Leaving an evanescent trail of light,
As though to say, “I am here but for a moment,
Experience the joy and ecstasy of my burning ice
Before I fade from sight.”

The child trapped inside me still from 1986,
Who looked up at the night sky with wonder,
Whose curiosity was not yet squelched,
Wants to know what has become of his soul,
What causes the light to burn so intensely,
And then become suffocated by gravity,
Whether it will take 76 years to return.
I am still waiting for further report from the Challenger.

ILLUSTRATION: People of Earth Excited by the Passage of Halley’s Comet (Mary Evans Picture Library).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: A version of this poem was originally published in Redshift 2 (Arroyo Seco Press, 2019). I often go back and edit poems I’ve written and even published, especially when they stay with me. The Challenger creeps into much of my writing because it was such an impactful event on my childhood. I am constantly excavating the ruins of this memory to help me build the present version of my identity and understand the impact of history on the present moment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Steven Hendrix received his M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from California State University, Long Beach. He co-hosted the pop-up bookstore and reading series Read On Till Morning in San Pedro, California, and is the co-author of the poetry collection Leave With More Than You Came With (Arroyo Seco Press, 2019). His work has appeared in Chiron Review, Redshift, Silver Birch Press, Hobo Camp Review, and Drunk Monkeys, among others. His website, readontillmorning.com, will be coming soon. He currently lives in San Francisco.

A Dog in Space by Lillian Nećakov (I AM STILL WAITING Series)

A Dog in Space
by Lillian Nećakov 

I am still

waiting
lost in the flesh of a word
that once draped herself over
the tongues of those who
loved me

I am still

waiting
for the skinny boy with hands
gentle as snow
whose laughter hula hooped
the saints and seas

I am still

waiting
muscle lazy as mud
to be ferried past Galileo’s grooves
while the earth curves her back
against the un-dogged nebula

I am still

moving
past the blush of horizon
heart jackhammering against
g-force mongrel mother
orbiting my own eulogy
barked through the November streets
by dusty mutts
on the heels of extinction
past the moonbeam filament

I am still

waiting
in the flesh of a word
in the gutter of a prayer
in the underside
of a song.

ILLUSTRATION: Laika by Phineas X. Jones.

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Laika, a stray from the streets of Moscow, occupied the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 launched into outer space on November 3, 1957. The first animal to orbit Earth, she did not survive the mission—a topic of ongoing discussion. 

ILLUSTRATION: Laika by Phineas X. Jones.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lillian Nećakov is the author of six books of poetry, numerous chapbooks, broadsides and leaflets. Her book il virus (a Feed Dog Book) was published by Anvil Press in April 2021. During the 1980s, she ran a micro press called “The Surrealist Poets Gardening Association” and sold her books on Toronto’s Yonge Street. She ran the Boneshaker Reading series from 2010-2020. She lives in Toronto and just might be working on a new book.

Gravity, poem by John Frederick Nims

GRAVITY
by John Frederick Nims

Mildest of all the powers of earth: no lightnings
For her—maniacal in the clouds. No need for
Signs with their skull and crossbones, chain-link gates:
Danger! Keep Out! High Gravity! she’s friendlier.
Won’t nurse—unlike the magnetic powers—repugnance;
Would reconcile, draw close: her passion’s love.
 
No terrors lurking in her depths, like those
Bound in that buzzing strongbox of the atom,
Terrors that, lossened, turn the hills vesuvian,
Trace in cremation where the cities were.
 
No, she’s our quiet mother, sensible.
But therefore down-to-earth, not suffering
Fools who play fast and loose among the mountains,
Who fly in her face, or, drunken, clown on cornices.
 
She taught our ways of walking. Her affection
Adjusted the morning grass, the sands of summer
Until our soles fit snug in each, walk easy.
Holding her hand, we’re safe. Should that hand fail,
The atmosphere we breathe would turn hysterical,
Hiss with tornadoes, spinning us from earth
Into the cold unbreathable desolations.
 
Yet there—in fields of space—is where she shines,
Ring-mistress of the circus of the stars,
Their prancing carousels, their ferris wheels
Lit brilliant in celebration. Thanks to her
All’s gala in the galaxy.
 
                                   Down here she
Walks us just right, not like the jokey moon
Burlesquing our human stride to kangaroo hops;
Not like vast planets, whose unbearable mass
Would crush us in a bear hug to their surface
And into the surface, flattened. No: deals fairly.
Makes happy each with each: the willow bend
Just so, the acrobat land true, the keystone
Nestle in place for bridge and for cathedral.
Let us pick up—or mostly—what we need:
Rake, bucket, stone to build with, logs for warmth,
The fallen fruit, the fallen child . . . ourselves.
 
Instructs us too in honesty: our jointed
Limbs move awry and crisscross, gawky, thwart;
She’s all directness and makes that a grace,
All downright passion for the core of things,
For rectitude, the very ground of being:
Those eyes are leveled where the heart is set.
 
See, on the tennis court this August day:
How, beyond human error, she’s the one
Whose will the bright balls cherish and obey
—As if in love. She’s tireless in her courtesies
To even the klutz (knees, elbows all a-tangle),
Allowing his poky serve Euclidean whimsies,
The looniest lob its joy: serene parabolas.

SOURCE: “Gravity” appears in John Frederick Nims’ collection The Six-Cornered Snowflake and Other Poems (New Directions, 1990), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Poet and academic John Frederick Nims (1913-1999) graduated from DePaul University, University of Notre Dame with an M.A., and from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. He taught English at Harvard University, the University of Florence, the University of Toronto, Williams College and the University of Missouri. His books of poetry include Zany in Denim (University of Arkansas Press, 1990); The Six-Cornered Snowflake and Other Poems (1990); The Kiss: A Jambalaya (1982); Knowledge of the Evening (1960), nominated for a National Book Award; A Fountain in Kentucky (1950); and The Iron Pastoral (1947). Among his honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, a National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities grant, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The Institute of the Humanities. He served as editor of Poetry magazine from 1978 to 1984.

Painting: ”Le Château des Pyrénées” by René Magritte (1959)

Spider Crystal Ascension, poem by Charles Wright

SPIDER CRYSTAL ASCENSION
by Charles Wright

The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way, drifts on his web through the night sky
And looks down, waiting for us to ascend …
 
At dawn he is still there, invisible, short of breath, mending his net.
 
All morning we look for the white face to rise from the lake like a tiny star.
And when it does, we lie back in our watery hair and rock.
***
“Spider Crystal Ascension” by Charles Wright appears in Country Music: Selected Early Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1982)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac. (Read more at wikipedia.org)

PHOTO: “A twisted star-forming web in Galaxy IC 342” (NASA). Note: Looking like a spider’s web swirled into a spiral, the galaxy IC 342 presents its delicate pattern of dust in this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Seen in infrared light, the faint starlight gives way to the glowing bright patterns of dust found throughout the galaxy’s disk. (Read more at nasa.gov)

Light-years, poem by Hester Knibbe

LIGHT-YEARS
by Hester Knibbe (Translated by Jacquelyn Pope)

It’s a beautiful world, you said,
with these trees, marshes, deserts,
grasses, rivers and seas
 
and so on. And the moon is really something
in its circuits
of relative radiance. Include
 
the wingèd M, voluptuous
Venus, hotheaded Mars, that lucky devil
J and cranky Saturn, of course, plus
 
U and N and the wanderer P, in short
the whole solar family, complete with its
Milky Way, and count up all the other
 
systems with dots and spots and in
that endless emptiness what you’ve got
is a commotion of you-know-what. It’s a beautiful
 
universe, you said, just take a good look
through the desert’s dark glasses
for instance or on your back
 
in seas of grass, take a good look
at the deluge of that Rorschach—we’re standing out there
somewhere, together.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hester Knibbe’s books of poems include Oogsteen (2009) and Bedrieglijke dagen (2008), both from De Arbeiderspers. She received the A. Roland Holst prize in 2009.

PHOTO: “Desert Snow” by Wally Pacholka/Astropics.com, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Note on photo: Constellation Canis Major with the brightest star of night sky, Sirius, shines above Southern California’s Joshua Tree National Park (December 2008).

Leonids Over Us, poem by Marge Piercy

LEONIDS OVER US
by Marge Piercy

The sky is streaked with them

burning holes in black space –

like fireworks, someone says

all friendly in the dark chill

of Newcomb Hollow in November,

friends known only by voices.


 
We lie on the cold sand and it

embraces us, this beach

where locals never go in summer

and boast of their absence. Now

we lie eyes open to the flowers

of white ice that blaze over us


 
and seem to imprint directly

on our brains. I feel the earth,

rolling beneath as we face out

into the endlessness we usually

ignore. Past the evanescent

meteors, infinity pulls hard.

NOTE: The Leonids is a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Tempel-Tuttle. The Leonids get their name from the location of their radiant in the constellation Leo: the meteors appear to radiate from that point in the sky. (Read more at wikipedia.org.)

Photo: Leonids meteor shower, 2009

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Poet, novelist, and essayist Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1936. She won a scholarship to the University of Michigan and later earned a master’s degree from Northwestern University. She has published fifteen books of poetry, including Colors Passing Through Us (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme (1999), Early Grrrl: The Early Poems of Marge Piercy (1999), What Are Big Girls Made Of? (1997), Mars and Her Children (1992), Available Light (1988), Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy (1982), and The Moon Is Always Female (1980). She is also the author of a collection of essays on poetry, Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt (1982). The most recent of Piercy’s fifteen novels are Three Women (1999), Storm Tide (with Ira Wood, 1998), City of Darkness, City of Light (1996), The Longings of Women (1994), and He, She and It (1991). Piercy lives with her husband, writer Ira Wood, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Visit her online at margepiercy.com. (Source: poets.org)

Gravity, poem by John Frederick Nims

GRAVITY
by John Frederick Nims

Mildest of all the powers of earth: no lightnings
For her—maniacal in the clouds. No need for
Signs with their skull and crossbones, chain-link gates:
Danger! Keep Out! High Gravity! she’s friendlier.
Won’t nurse—unlike the magnetic powers—repugnance;
Would reconcile, draw close: her passion’s love.
 
No terrors lurking in her depths, like those
Bound in that buzzing strongbox of the atom,
Terrors that, lossened, turn the hills vesuvian,
Trace in cremation where the cities were.
 
No, she’s our quiet mother, sensible.
But therefore down-to-earth, not suffering
Fools who play fast and loose among the mountains,
Who fly in her face, or, drunken, clown on cornices.
 
She taught our ways of walking. Her affection
Adjusted the morning grass, the sands of summer
Until our soles fit snug in each, walk easy.
Holding her hand, we’re safe. Should that hand fail,
The atmosphere we breathe would turn hysterical,
Hiss with tornadoes, spinning us from earth
Into the cold unbreathable desolations.
 
Yet there—in fields of space—is where she shines,
Ring-mistress of the circus of the stars,
Their prancing carousels, their ferris wheels
Lit brilliant in celebration. Thanks to her
All’s gala in the galaxy.
 
                                   Down here she
Walks us just right, not like the jokey moon
Burlesquing our human stride to kangaroo hops;
Not like vast planets, whose unbearable mass
Would crush us in a bear hug to their surface
And into the surface, flattened. No: deals fairly.
Makes happy each with each: the willow bend
Just so, the acrobat land true, the keystone
Nestle in place for bridge and for cathedral.
Let us pick up—or mostly—what we need:
Rake, bucket, stone to build with, logs for warmth,
The fallen fruit, the fallen child . . . ourselves.
 
Instructs us too in honesty: our jointed
Limbs move awry and crisscross, gawky, thwart;
She’s all directness and makes that a grace,
All downright passion for the core of things,
For rectitude, the very ground of being:
Those eyes are leveled where the heart is set.
 
See, on the tennis court this August day:
How, beyond human error, she’s the one
Whose will the bright balls cherish and obey
—As if in love. She’s tireless in her courtesies
To even the klutz (knees, elbows all a-tangle),
Allowing his poky serve Euclidean whimsies,
The looniest lob its joy: serene parabolas.

“Gravity” appears in The Six-Cornered Snowflake and Other Poems. Copyright © 1990 by John Frederick Nims, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Painting: “Le Château des Pyrénées” by René Magritte (1959)