Rice: Poems

Black Orion

51 Black Orion The Star Man was Frederick J. Davenport, 1903–1992. In his orbiting eyes we are all slaves still And there are more new ones of us born every day Slavish to things we cannot do without Slavic to whatever is new and fandangled Polished and pearled In his cornfield while waiting for grouse to stir To shoot and freeze for Christmas he told me I am leaving a world of slaves behind Girl So what am I really leaving Time to go When that’s all what’s left Each of you is every letter of the wanting rainbow No wonder you define loneliness by what you do not have There at least I’ll be around things that ain’t so beholdin’ A star man has lifted off the ground A brilliant man is walking weightless through his own clouds A man who did not know that things had ever changed Because he beheld the sky as something that may shift But was forever dependably exact A man who did not believe that things should ever change His only concern was up His channel was the shifting sky and the always ground He found scripture in the tissue-thin pages of the almanac A man who did not want to know the answer to it all Who liked it the old way just fine 52 In college astronomy 1959 Fred J. Davenport wrote a paper He predicted that in ten years more or less A man would walk the moon And would he be a slave too Of course he would If he turned around and came back here Handing in these dreamy notions To learned men who graded him poorly Slaves he said of them all As he sat before their limited eyes Slaves would only see it as luminated soil The star man saw it as real and therefore walkable His prediction missed by only weeks This blazing unfettered man Who spent his life staring at the sky More than he kept up or eye on any human spheres Knew he scared me how he knew Don’t get on the road until Lyra lines up with Orion Yes sir (He knew) Barley colored Bespeckled Tincaps and goobers always in his pockets Cracked shells his human droppings all over his land This (this!) is the real money At night he would stand before the sky Arms folded and alone A motionless dragon nostriling the dark Breaking bread at his terrestrial table And tossing Dr. Carver seeds as he came and went 53 Preaching always about the arrangement of above And nothing else His white corn-silk hair moving downwind Like a cloud of gas and dust The Black Orion Who planted taters and melons By the aggregates of lights and darks By shooting stars and the aurora australis Explained to me that I was a slave Because I could never stay long enough To see his meteor’s shower Because I could never come and visit him alone There in his pine-tree galaxy Teeming with red dust bowls and candle flies And to his unbuttoned eyes There it was always too sacred and dark Too perfect and complete To welcome my hardbound no-count books So many times I came up his road A skinny empty-handed woman And left a fat imaginative girl With too many presents for my arms to carry It is Sunday I call home I hear Mama say He’s gone Baby The star man left the ground today Lifted off without me Just like he said he would Gone up Away far From all of us clinging sightless slaves ...