Brian Tierney - "Earth Is Not a Door"

Curiosity tells us there are blue dunes
on Mars; that there was water, once, before us,
belonging to no one—
as though space exploration were a post-
colonial thought.

There are five U.S. flags left standing
on the moon, five dollars
each, stitched with nylon from Jersey, all of them
bleached into one color, now,
in the nation of nothingness. God says I don’t believe you.
And Dr. Snaut goes on about how we don’t want
other worlds, in the first film
Solaris; we just want

a mirror—which I take to mean we
cut down trees we press into reams on which we write
down our history of cutting
down the trees; or that space rocks crumble
then clump, as does my Godmom Mar-ie
on the mantle, here, in front of me, even if I shake her
& make a stupid wish. The first of us
to occupy the Americas may not have
crossed Beringia Land Bridge, a new report
to believe

for now; just worm routes collapsing
behind us as we move. And I felt important
then, she said, my mother
that is, about her stint calibrating circuitry
chips with miniature instruments
for Apollo 11, when she needed money
for gas and college—

Like what happened that one time,
when we turned the two mirrors,
Sean and Constance and I,
what happened after we turned them
to face one another, in the sun, was
that the sun became an amplified burst
going down, coming in, the snow-blinded walls
in that one perfect minute
I was standing inside
a star.

- Brian Tierney, from “Rise and Float”

From "Proverbs"

“…The ear that heareth the reproof of life abideth among the wise.
He that refuseth instruction despiseth his own soul;
but he hear that heareth reproof getteth understanding.
The fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom;
and before honour is humility.”

- Proverbs 15:31-33

From "The Easter Parade", by Richard Yates

“….One day when Emily was finished at the supermarket—she had learned how not to be stultified by the supermarket, how to deal with it in quick, competent movements that brought results—she sat for a long time in the steaming brilliance of the laundromat. She watched the whirl of suds and soaked cloth in the porthole of her machine; then she watched the other customers, trying to guess which were students and which were faculty and which were people from the town. She bought a chocolate bar and it tasted surprisingly good—as if, without her knowing it, sitting here and eating this chocolate was the one thing she had wanted to do all day. Waiting for the drying cycle to end she began to feel a vague dread, but it wasn’t until she was at the warm, lint-speckled folding table that she figured it out: she didn’t want to go home.”

- Richard Yates, from Part 2, Chapter 1 of “The Easter Parade”

Jack Gilbert - What to Want

The room was like getting married.
A landfall and the setting forth.
A dearness and vessel. A small room
eight by twelve, filled by the narrow iron bed.
Six stories up, under the roof
and no elevator. A maid's room long ago.
In the old quarter, on the other hill
with the famous city stretched out
below. His window like an ocean.
The great bells of the cathedral counting
the hours all night while everyone slept.
After two years, he had come to
the beginning. Past the villa at Como,
past the police moving him from jail
to jail to hide him from the embassy.
His first woman gone back to Manhattan,
the friends gone back to weddings
or graduate school. He was finally alone.
Without money. A wind blowing through
where much of him used to be. No longer
the habit of himself. The blinding intensity
giving way to presence. The budding
amid the random passion. Mortality like
a cello inside him. Like rain in the dark.
Sin a promise. What interested him
most was who he was about to become.

- Jack Gilbert