Читать книгу A Pretty Sight - David O'Meara - Страница 7

As Poet Laureate of the Moon

I’d like to welcome you

to the opening of the Armstrong Centre

for the Performing Arts. I was asked to prepare

a special verse to mark

this important occasion. And I’d be the first

to confess: the assignment

stumped me. Glancing around my workspace’s

dials and gauges, and the moonscape

through triple hermetic Plexiglas,

I struggled to settle on the proper content

to hard-text into the glow of my thought-screen.

In the progress of art and literature, the moon’s

been as constant a theme as rivers or the glare

of the sun, though even after several bowls

of potent plum wine, a T’ang poet would never

have guessed, addressing this satellite across

the darkness, that someone would ever write back.

The Centre itself, I know, isn’t much;

a duct-lined node bolted to the laboratory,

powered by sectional solar panels mounted

on trusses, parked not far from the first

Apollo landing. We live with bare minimum:

cramped, nutrient-deprived, atrophying

like versions of our perishables

in vacuum-pack. The lack’s made my sleep

more vivid. Last night I dreamt I was in

a pool where cattle hydrated, then

fell tenderly apart in perfect lops of meat.

(I see a few of you nodding there in the back.)

So what good will one room do us? Maybe

none. Maybe this streamlined aluminum

will become our Lascaux, discovered by aliens

ages hence, pressing them to wonder what

our rituals meant, what they said of our hopes and fears.

Somewhere in this lunar grind, in the cratered gap

between survival and any outside meaning,

must be the clue to our humanity, the way

Camus once argued the trouble for Sisyphus

wasn’t the endless failure to prop

a rock atop some hill, but the thoughts

he had on the way back down.

Which brings me to the astronauts of Apollo 11.

After snapping the horizon through the lens

of a single Hasselblad, knowing every boot tread

they left was eternal, they’d squeezed

through the hatch of their landing module, shut

and resealed it for return to Earth,

then discovered, due to cramped space

and the bulk of their spacesuits, they’d crushed

the switch for the ascent engine. The rockets failed

to activate. So Buzz Aldrin used part of a pen

to trigger the damaged breaker, toggling until

it fired the sequence for launch. This

was the quiet work of his engineer’s mind.

He kept the pen for the rest of his years,

which is another kind of thinking, akin to that

slight pivoting, as Camus would call it,

when we glance backward over our lives.

What we keep in the pause between facts

might be the beginning of art. Which is where

we are in this room tonight. I’ll have to stop there;

the teleprompter is flashing for wrap-up. Following

tonight’s program, I’m happy to announce

an extra ration of Natural Form and H2O

will be served by the airlock. I think

you’re in for quite a show. So hold on

to your flight diapers as we cue the dancers

who’ve timed their performance to the backdrop

of Earthrise. There it is now in the tinted

north viewpoint. Look at that, folks. To think

they still find bones of dinosaurs there.