ANY MOONWALKER CAN TELL YOU

About the poetics of space.  Bachelard would say,

that every poet staring out the window is displaced in place, the universe

outside the

              glass rippling away from an imagined center, a

dream state—each leaf on the hillside rustling with reverie, in the way

a candle flame can set an angel spinning and flashing on a carousel of tin.

Each little

              room

a universe: the piled papers on the desk, the cooling coffee cup among the

empty

               coffee cups, the browning overwatered spider plants which, if

understood

              for all their history would tell not just one story, but everything

back to the

              first footprint in the dust, the first flower blooming outward ever-

expanding

to the last sun’s death. But it can work the other way— immensity on all

sides

               pointing, pushing in. Inside  

their suits, staring through their plastic shells

toward home, 251,000 miles away,

did the men on that cold rock—like Milosz,

confronted with “the garden of the wonders of space” receive that joy of

solitude,

those waters spread for miles in every direction among the stars floating

and flying—

             and stretch

their arms and leap

like divers from some cliff. Or reflecting on the tiny ball,

half-swallowed in their own open mouths, were they

afraid?