Saturnalian, and: Voyager Two's Prayer to Uranus
- Saturnalian, and: Voyager Two's Prayer to Uranus
Saturnalian
Voyager One at Titan
November 12, 1980
26 degrees in Virgo
The moon has you in mind tonight, unsteady in her attention. Light shears itself from her starboard skirts. No need to be coy – desire is a function of knowing yourself small in the universe's spiraled arms, of carving a home in each unrequited ache. Revolutions hurry the multitudes of our bodies: yours made of water, mine of tin and gold. You make cathedrals beneath whatever blue hissed sky you crash along, cursing yourself inside every repeated prayer. The old giants must fall. [End Page 48]
Voyager Two's Prayer to Uranus
Voyager Two at Uranus
January 24, 1986
19 degrees in Sagittarius
Teach me elegance. To bare my ice across the sky.Teach me the language of North, of rust, of the cruxof my crash. I'll be clumsy with your echo.Teach me how methane opens in your iced sky.How to beg the sun to shine another way.Teach me to be Greek among Romans,to survive by pulling off my clothes to pray.I will do what I'm told. Elliptical. Electric.I'll shake my can across the night, tired as Miranda.Show me the ways I will hurt, meteor bruised,finally forgiven. How a cool knife can part my framefrom form. The universe will boil in all her fury.Father of time, teach me how to not want this. [End Page 49]
Jessica Rae Bergamino's most recent chapbook is The Desiring Object or Voyager Two Explains to the Gathering of Stars How She Came to Glow Among Them (Sundress Publications, 2016). Individual poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, The Cincinnati Review, Willow Springs, Gulf Coast, and The Journal.
