Ground Control to Major Tom—David Bowie
The stars shuffed off their light like snakeskin.
I sit in darkness. Oh that my words were engraved
with an iron pen and lead in the rock forever [1]
and my struggle to get beyond Arcturus was known—
that kite constellation with a lightning rod at its corner.
He garnished the heavens, yet formed the crooked snake. [2]
Who can understand? I lost everything I had.
I was mocked by boys. I was accused of suffering
because of wrongdoing. But God does what He does.
He tries whom He tries. Yet I know He lives and will stand
at the latter day on the Earth. [3]
There is a path no fowl knows which the falcon’s eye
has not seen. [4] The heavens are full of falcon’s eyes.
My wife thinks they are the eyes of her first children,
but they are stars in this traveling corral where we are kept
until God calls.
There is Big-Time life beyond the battlefield of this Earth.
I know it in the flow tube which the brain is. These
b-fields of rotary motion—The Unmovable One with a b-bomb
up His sleeve moving against J-prime—me.
I sit on this ash heap. I scrape my boils, these b-blisters,
these robes of fright. What craziness these ideas—
God is one straight line through another. He rolls the truth
of His axioms. He speaks in voices from His zone.
What b-swarm do I see in my telescope? What eyeball
with a voice??— I recalculate the change in velocity
through this darkness—I hear His strings singing
the Universe not once out of beat. I get it then. B-balmed.
B-fit.
[1] Job 19:24
[2] Job 26:13
[3] Job 19:25
[4] Job 28:7
Diane Glancy is professor emerita at Macalester College. Her 2014-15 books are Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education, nonfiction, University of Nebraska Press; Report to the Department of the Interior, poetry, University of New Mexico Press, and three novels from Wipf & Stock, Uprising of Goats, One of Us, and Ironic Witness. Other publications are at www.dianeglancy.com and www.dianeglancy.org.