Vida en marte. Tracy K. Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ he says. Before the world went upside down.

      Hero, survivor, God’s right hand man, I know he sees the blank

      Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.

      He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,

      Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth And:

      May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.

      Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.

      A fountain in the neighbor’s yard babbles to itself, and the night air

      Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.

       We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth

      Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone

      One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.

      Our eyes adjust to the dark.

      3.

      Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,

      That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—

      When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,

      Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel

      Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

      Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,

      Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones

      At whatever are their moons. They live wondering

      If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,

      And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.

      Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

      Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

      At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

      Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want it to be

      One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

      Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

      And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

      Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

      So that I might be sitting now beside my father

      As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe

      For the first time in the winter of 1959.

      4.

      In those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001

      When Dave is whisked into the center of space,

      Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light

      Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid

      For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,

      Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,

      Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent

      And vague, swirls in, and on and on….

      In those last scenes, as he floats

      Above Jupiter’s vast canyons and seas,

      Over the lava strewn plains and mountains

      Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn’t blink.

      In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked

      Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time,

      Who knows what blazes through his mind?

      Is it still his life he moves through, or does

      That end at the end of what he can name?

      On set, it’s shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,

      Then the costumes go back on their racks

      And the great gleaming set goes black.

      5.

      When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said

      They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed

      In papery green, the room a clean cold, and bright white.

      He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,

      His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,

      When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

      To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons

      Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.

      His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

      As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending

      Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons

      For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

      We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

      The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed

      For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,

      The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is—

      So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

      DIOS MÍO, ESTÁ LLENO DE ESTRELLAS

      1.

      Nos gusta equipararlo a lo que ya conocemos,

      Aunque más grande. Un hombre contra las autoridades. O un

      Hombre СКАЧАТЬ