The Mountaineer’s Daughter, and: The Second Moon Colony Will Not Fail

returned to the woods to be unmade.    Her father went for the summit;she for the traversal across        the forest floor, and all that came with it:the quartz-flecked trail,                the soft bellyof the stream slurping under her feet,    the grooves impressed on boulderswhere glaciers screeched out        a record of their passing.She went to find prehistoric gneissand ferns, still steadfast after all these years,and all the things of the earththat are knitted into the grammar of time.And she went to feel her humanness annihilated,            even if for a while.

In the early owl-light, she searched for the source    of the stream; she followed its amphibian undersong,until night fell and—    humming and waterlogged—            she found it.

Inside, she sensed her own time-    table recording itself on her bones, and hopedthat someday another wanderer would find    the curve of her spine,        her long arms and splayed fingers,            her worn gimbal joints at the hips,    and know how far she journeyed to find herselfcrouching at the cutbank        with a colony of frogs,called back by the centripetal pull of an early memory    of belly-flopping in, hindlimbs fully extended.

The Second Moon Colony Will Not Fail,

    the president promised us.We volunteered as we always will for beauty and an exitway:    for moon,     a faraway pearlblintering at the edge of an unfathomable sea    of stars. We volunteered for bountyor bust up     or belief in progress,

or because the words jabbed us like a finger on a poster:

If you are a U. S. citizen or resident alien in good health,    sign up today to voyage to the moon!

We volunteered because we were bored    or at war        or because the earth was dying            and because we would seeearthshine for the first time        from the near side of the moon.

    We volunteered because we could turnour imaginations outward or upward,        away from ourselves;because we could scream at each other        across a soundless atmosphere,and then make love on land where gravity is a weak thread.

We volunteered because we were reckless and had readRobinson Crusoe through and through    and needed a way stationfor our wonder. We volunteered despite suspecting that someday,        when we have grown pale and spindly,we will return to our lunar caves    on a dark afternoon,        slough off our space suits like skin,and dream in our military bunks    of lush warm tones        too green to be real.