That’s one small step for man

James Bowden

They really said, we’re putting a poem on the moooon,
I read this in M’s voice, thank you for this gift of inflection,
I’ve been thinking too much about how each person
touches my life of late, trying to dissect the meat of
each interaction, turn stardust to dirt, and OK. So it
turns out all of it really is just moondirt, but the kids
don’t have to know that, I don’t have to know that,
don’t want to, I’m trying to live a poetic life over here,
still hold the dirt, I mean stardust, but let it slip
through my fingers and tell myself I meant to let it go.
It’s a bloody mess up there. An asteroid belt of phrases
and sounds and knowing that Ada Limón’s poem will
be on the Europa Clipper, which my ex designed landing
gear for back when we were still in love. A wobbling
singularity eats itself at the middle. I wonder if I can
model my thoughts with Hamiltonian dynamics, arcing
about the surface of spacetime and crashing into Pluto.
I’ve a few planets, fortunately, but they won’t talk to me
anymore and exist but behind my eyelids. No matter–
I loose my neurons like a particle swarm each morning, each
empty moment really, and your orbit brings us into
contact about once every week. And I wish I could
deliver a poem to you but I think we’d both burn up
upon reentry and besides, your planetary defense
systems are much stronger than my grin these days.
But if I could, if, I’d lie flat against your dusty surface.
Arms wide. I’d promise to try to embrace all of you. Well,
and then I’d bounce around joyfully in the levity of our
gravity.