Drink Up
Some of space is made of diamond.
Some, of booze.
The gods’ own liquor cabinet
tastes like antifreeze.
You’d never be sober again.
See that world made of diamond?
When an asteroid pummels it,
damage only reveals another facet,
digs out another vein of light.
Let’s swallow a nebula’s worth
of spirits, turn away
from the seas and shores of tiny men.
Touch your palm to something bright and cold.
Whirl it round some eager sun.
Giant-Impact Theory of Lunar Formation
When your corpse
is permeated
by earth
and time, long after
your lovers,
think what
billion eyes
will blink
at the light
you’ve given back.
Project Excelsior
When Captain Joseph Kittinger jumped
from the gondola of a helium balloon
into the stratosphere,
his right glove came loose.
The air is thin in almost-space,
too sparse even for birds
to push. The pressure
of blood in the ungloved hand
met near-nothing
and won. The hand
unfurled as it fell,
the man attached too undone
for pain. It bloomed
with blood, starlit
bones, up-bursting feathers.
The fear that one has wings.
The air grew thick again.
He survived the fall,
the ground. We survived
the new world he found.
