Poetry | June 01, 2010
Poetry Feature: Benjamin S. Grossberg
Benjamin S. Grossberg
Featuring the poems:
-
The Space Traveler’s Husband
-
The Space Traveler and Wandering (featured as Poem of the Week, Sept. 21, 2010)
-
The Space Traveler, Great Filter
-
The Space Traveler and Crop Circles
-
The Space Traveler’s Husband
-
The Space Traveler and Runaway Stars
The Space Traveler and Wandering
Roadless vehicle: means that every
instance is a juncture, that every
path branches always-and in three
dimensions. This is the burden
of untethering wholly: all planets, all
places have equal claim, anywhere
become everywhere. Once I put
roots down on a world in the most
literal sense: slid with my index finger
row after row of seeds into nearly
granulated soil: on all fours, palms
and knees roughening, darkening.
I crawled the field’s length beneath
that planet’s triple suns, saw at equal
spacing the nearly translucent cones
burst from the ground. And soon
how they uncoiled into spears.
There was no reason for the gladness
this occasioned in my heart, no cause
to adore the line after line of them,
that my hand seemed to raise them
higher and higher from the dirt, each
a marionette made to pull itself
up to full height. I think of them now,
looking out a window of this ship:
panning the scattering of stars,
themselves like seeds indexed into
the black loam of space. There was
a field that was my home, a world
I understood in the long silences
of its dawns. Now there’s this:
stars thick and old as fire. In all
their history, none have cracked
open, no golden thread of roots
unwinding beneath them.
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