The Adventures of Ibn Opcit

Day 4. Ptolemy Was Right

129 Day 4. Ptolemy Was Right The Cosmonaut is alone. On earth it is Christmas Eve. Ibn Dear “Anybody on this frequency,” is anybody there? Into his can-on-a-string the poet whispers, This will be my last report. It will be like a brilliant sermon in an empty church. When all its edicts have been disobeyed, and the last government on earth is done, well may the man still standing ask which one— the government or the man—has been betrayed. Language is a gift of God to man, and the poet is His tool. When all the governments on earth are done, the man who speaks will not have been their fool. On earth you wake and the name of the world is Christmas. Up here Opcit at his porthole can but study the sun like a dime-sized portion of the sky; like a stone oven in its calm, sad roil of heat. On earth the moonrise, like a gold dome, lights from within. Up here the moon shows a face like a slice of chaos, an immense killing-stone Opcit hopes like the plague to avoid. The way to know the world is not from 200 miles. Astronauts embark on spiritual voyages. They fly to see meteorites directly puffing on the moon, they land on its ulcerated face. They pose, in the irradiated stillness, for the Standin’-on-the-ladder, Lookin’-at-the-stars shot. The mirrored bowls of their helmets do not show their wide, regarding smiles. Under the whelm of the view 130 they become religionists. In the reduce of gravity they jump like toxic kangaroos. They unwrap themselves to lunar dust and they don’t care. But the way to know the world is not from 200,000 miles. As the gravity of earth is so strong we fly to it, so this need to engage life in some primary way. Finally the human fascination is with each other. This is why we mourn each other when we die. Why finally what remains is respect, for ourselves and others. Myself, I grow vacant before the miracle, I grow silent before the sovereignty within. I was ready at sunset. I was ready in the hours when the day starts counting over. I sit here now, in the many-layered quiet of 5 a.m. In the tenseness preceding emancipation I put on my shoes of wakefulness, my seven-league boots. In the human spirit do we have a lifeless, pockmarked asteroid, or do we have a meteor? The answer hit me like a blessing in disguise. I will choose the ride that only I can make. I choose return, the deep return to earth, to me the altogether beautiful. Is Opcit stranded in an outer altitude? No more than his body in its otherness circumscribes the soul. Like the giant clam I’ve got only one move but it’s a good one. I will push the joystick forward. In this, the acceptable year of our Lord, I will do the Christmas override. I will be the promise of Christmas come. I begin to make provision for my mortality. Oar by oar we’re going to lighten ship, going to reduce this capsule to its barest rudiments. 131 (Me and the engine eye each other: That’s all there is?) I check for emergency sufficiencies. (Are seatbacks and tray tables returned to their upright, lost positions?) I listen to the capsule’s signature clicks. The on-board computer gets excited. I give it a bunch of numbers, it gives me a bunch of numbers back. Alpha, becka, decka, wrecka—it spits out whole passelquods of numerology. It declares I got the Plan! I check the emotional gauges: red line all around. As the tip of a plow catches the shroud of sod and begins its work, so this pod will homestead earth’s freemantle air. As an elevator in its infinite wisdom shuts its doors and drops, so this capsule in a plummet will scare the damn out of me entire. As an oven you open to an ebullience of heat will test the limits of temperature’s ability to affect us, so this capsule like a flame-chosen steak, like a hamburger on a grill, will knit with heat. Till words won’t hold the weight of it this pod, Ibn within, will break into flame like a final poem...