(after Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)
I.

Among the panoply of stars

The only moving thing

Was the mind of the astronaut.
II.

I was of three minds

As at first sight of a space-station

Crewed by two astronauts.
III.

The astronaut tumbled slowly in the void beyond Earth.

She was the foreground to a cosmic pantomime.
IV.

Below, the lands and the seas and the clouds

Are one.

The lands and the seas and the clouds and the astronaut

Are one.
V.

I do not know which to prefer,

The volumetrics of the Tuscan column,

Or the voluptuousness of the dirigible,

The astronaut’s igniting propulsion unit

Or just after.
VI.

The Earth filled the impenetrable visor

With its sea-shepherd blue.

The reflection of the astronaut

Crossed it, to and fro.

The ache

Traced in the reflection’s antumbra

An unfathomable cause.
VII.

O ignorant and rapacious men destroying forests

In the Amazon, smudging archipelagos in Asia.

Why do you imagine golden locusts shall fill your coffers?

Do you not see the astronaut

On bended knees observing your desecrations.
VIII.

I know the beauty of symmetry in equations

And lucidity in columns of algorithms;

But I know, also,

That the astronaut is involved

In what I know.
IX.

When the Earth vectored out of sight

The astronaut became the pale

Marking the latest frontier.
X.

At the sight of the astronaut

Brightling in the feint blue light,

Even the epics of Homer

Would recede to nursery tales.
XI.

The astronaut slowly cartwheeled over continents

In her space-shroud.

Once, a fear pierced her,

In that she mistook

A malfunction in the voice communications

For a loss of pressure.
XII.

The light of the world is moving.

The astronaut must be vectoring in space.
XIII.

It was darkness all day and every day.

It was silent

And it was going to remain silent.

The astronaut suspended

In the royal-jelly of space.