Space-Walker Looks Forward
The ultimate step outside
I’d like to be some time
free-floating irresponsible
nowhere staring at somewhere
weightless nothing to heft
breathing pure artificial air
sans everything but a view
of this pallid star
earth as whey-faced lune
preposterous distant home
all its features blanked
to a blue and silver dish
a patterned splash of glory
on a black gallery wall
a brilliant light-filled abstract
the human erased
but for my goggling eye
exploring
this ultimate loneliness
hoping it might lead
to a sense of comic
cosmic acceptance
the astronaut as clown
saluting his earthly love
amidst a glitter of star ice
sending scattered signals back
there is no gravity here
I can’t stop smiling
watch this space.
Space Walker’s Abstraction
Staring back to earth
the perspective is all pattern
a wash of creamy cloud and ocean
a plate of Stilton soup
good enough to eat.
How everything turns back
to hunger. Is it escape
or encounter this exploration
without apparent utility,
as inner space becomes outer
a process between me
and the world made abstract
in which it’s possible to love
the idea of people,
to remember acts of kindness,
to long for arms that hold and fire,
without lead or boredom bullets
or plain old hatred, the gun
toting madman in the gore soaked Mall?
There’s a lot to be said for distance
making fonder the thumping
muscle in the chest,
small blessings and mercy:
there is no news here.
Space Walker at Play
Free floating
cutting the ties that bind
saying goodbye to
gardens wild with blossom
training for loss
doodling this space
treading weightless
in the dark
clarifies the view;
no need for media pundits
the busy distraction
of multiple screens
pods, phones, ibook etc
the useless cackle
of political games
no, here you can kick
back like a baby
in a bouncer seeking
thrills and the globe
transformed to a simple
plate which suggests
something might be gained
from renunciation
this willed escape into
playful space.
Space-Walker’s Escape and Encounter
There’s no sex up here
dancing in the dark alone
a cool freedom ices the loving
the monastic mission
of the suburban spaceman
to see the world whole
and no one staring back
to think how can this perfect O
be accident?
In this reality show
being becomes lightly bearable
not weighed down by taxes
mortgage, super, the demands of
the week-end car-wash
trimming suburban lawns
in the rotten damp where fear
masquerades as rectitude
and love speaks the language
of cash-exchange.
Imagine re-charging the batteries
beyond gravity
cultivating a space to call your own
beyond powerful illusions,
illusions of power:
see how small that man
at the lectern looks
soaping soft slippery words
to fox and box you in.
If only I could send some signals back
a bulletin of how-it-is out here
intimations of meaning from darkness
the whisper I heard from a tired God
but think I’ve lost the code.
Earth seems suspended in night
a coloured orb flashing in the cold
a disco ball after lights out
and the dancers have all gone home.
Space Walker Out of His Depth
It can be moody up here
alone in the darkness
looking back to earth
generates the existential
angst of astronauts:
how little we are, how big it is;
how quick our time, how long
the aeons of the universe.
Tempted to praise
what should reason worship
or find sacred but itself?
Is it possible to speak of faith
without sounding credulous?
What image might suffice
to hold the mystery?
Dogma won’t do.
Religion needs to bend and warp
like the space-time continuum;
learn to play with sub-atomic
particles. Sure, God isn’t
Super-Daddy with a white beard,
but maybe the unspeakable
beyond the weirdness
of scientific metaphor:
accelerating gravity
burrowing black holes
in the fabric of reality.[1]
Does this help allay the terror
of our smallness or our violence,
our carelessness towards the poor
and the planet I orbit
without progression,
addicted to this privileged space?
Space Walker Considers Re-Entry
It’s mental, up here, mental as anything:
this, the only place of escape,
the space you make for yourself
an illusion at least of freedom,
though it’s hard to shuck off
the increasing weight of years,
the growing loss,
the hopelessness of politics.
But somehow out of infinite darkness
these plates of light, the beckoning stars,
appear calling us back to belonging:
we are all made from the same dust;
all bodies shattered and heavenly at last.
Here, simultaneously, you can see
the long and short perspective,
the shallow streams or infinite depths
of mind reaching to grasp the expanding
universe. I persuade myself this is where
I want to be: on Mission Impossible
trying to realise something new;
one small step, etcetera. And for
inspiration my three-year-old grand-daughter
staring up on a cold, clear night saying,
Moon, Oh Wow! Her eyes round with delight,
flying saucers reminding me how it is love
sends me exploring, and love brings me
down to earth once more.
[1] This phrasing taken from an article by Amanda Gefner, ‘The strange fate of a person falling into a black hole’, BBC Earth, 25 May 2015. Gefner says here: ‘space-time can become so warped that it twists in on itself, burrowing a hole through the very fabric of reality’. See http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150525-a-black-hole-would-clone-you