I. When the Smoke Rings Sail



Although it scarcely matters where he is,

He’s in Urbana, Illinois, tonight,

As he is on most nights; it’s where he lives.

Move to New York, they’re always telling him.

Or San Francisco, L.A. , Washington—

As if these places were appreciably

Nearer, somehow, to what he writes about.

Even his friends, they don’t grasp that all places

Are roughly the same distance when your subject

Is Time itself, the pure future …

Besides, he’s drawn to these Midwestern skies,

Clean and enormous, stars all the way down

To the horizon, where the very lowest

Float at eye-level and the illusion is

You’re walking to the stars.

Most nights, he walks:

Studies the sky; hums a bit; smokes his pipe;

Under a streetlamp sometimes jots a note

Into his notepad; mostly, though, just walks,

Letting his mind wander. One night the moon

Called up a boyhood marble, rolling loose

Within the hold of some colossal ship

That might be thought of as a drifting speck

On a sea lit by a colossal moon.

He wrote that down. You never know …

He writes “boys’ books”—or so he’s sometimes told.

Well, true enough, his plots employ their share

Of rocket ships and anti-gravity

Devices, time-machines and -warps, and creatures

Spawned on far planets.

Boys’ books? He won’t argue

The term, in any case, except to say,

Who knows—maybe the kids have got it right?

And maybe growing old is just a way

Of drifting from the truth. In Astral Children

He brewed a world where aging is a form

Of madness, and the sane stay young forever.

Whatever his books were, he wrote them fast,

A new one every year, with luck—and yet,

For all his speed, hardly enough to keep him

In pencils, carbon paper, pipe tobacco.

Invasion of the Mantis Men—that’s his,

And Time’s Knock; Old Earth’s Torn Mantle; The Gears

Of History. Although they were his children,

He rarely glanced backward; no, his way was

The alligator’s—lay your clutch of eggs,

Kick some loose sand on top of them, move on.

Perhaps he liked The Teleminders best,

The one where scientists learn to project

Human-sized intellects into the brains

Of animals—a bear, a camel, even

Spiders and termites—only to discover

That these emancipated creatures, while

Keen to communicate among themselves,

Still want nothing to do with mankind …

Those typo-riddled books of his—cheap glue,

Cheap stock, cheap artwork—were all paperbacks,

Some housed within a sort of duplex, his own

Book with some total stranger’s book attached,

A two-for-one special.

Cohabitation

Was not his forte, it seemed, though any man

With five ex-wives and seven children surely

Might figure at least one would live nearby,

Lending companionship when things turned hard.

Things have turned hard for him. Tonight he walks

Through his adopted hometown of Urbana,

Streets dark, stars bright (it’s very late—two, three,

The unwatched hours he always has loved best,

When the mind’s gravity loosens a little),

And what’s a man to do with such a sky

But launch a couple smoke rings that resemble

Little life-vests (he wrote down that one, too),

For little lives afloat on Time’s great waters?



Time is his element, who wrote The Clock

Of Ages, Dinosaur Robots, Big Minutes.

Time: it’s two weeks now since the diagnosis

Of non-Hodgkins lymphoma—a rare “oma”

Lodged in the lymph system and seemingly

Dead-set on killing him. (By definition,

Of course, what kills you is a rarity:

That one one-in-a-million exit door

That’s got your name on it.) Soon, in the blink

Of an eye—Thirty years? Fifty?—they’ll find

A cure for this disease; yet he’ll be gone

Before that blink occurs. (Which means? His death’s

One more accident of timing …)

Yet it turns out to be more difficult

Than he would ever have supposed to square

His personal extinction with the heavens;

It has grown hard to gaze up at the stars.

They agitate him in a way he hasn’t

Felt since grade school, back in those blazing mornings

When love—the real McCoy, a hopeless passion

Larger by far than he was—swept him so

Feverishly, his body shook with it.

It seems (wouldn’t you know?) he’d fallen for

The class queen, Betsy Wren, and couldn’t bear

To look at her, almost, and couldn’t bear

To stop looking: bold glances that avowed,

Others are bigger, stronger, even funnier—

And yet, belovèd, I’m your most devoted.

That’s just the way the stars now make him feel;

He throws them pleading and assertive glances.

(I am the most devoted.)

The cold stars?

Their coldness, too, is but an accident

Of timing: yes, their hospitality

Will be revealed in Time, his element,

Which flows unseen across the glittering

Riverbed of the sky. It’s all the heaven

He’s ever asked of Heaven: to see the stars

For what they are: half-submerged stepping stones

To zones some unimaginable race

Will homestead when the sun’s a guttered candle.



II. When the Smoke Clears



The mind, that rambling bear, ransacks the sky

In search of honey,

Fish, berries, carrion. It minds no laws …

As if the heavens were some canvas tent,

It slashes through the firmament

To prise up the sealed stores with its big paws.



The mind, that sovereign camel, sees the sky

For what it is:

Each star a grain of sand along the vast

Passage to that oasis where, below

The pillared palms, the portico

Of fronds, the soul may drink its fill at last.



The mind, that gorgeous spider, webs the sky

With lines so sheer

They all but vanish, and yet star to star

(Thread by considered thread) slowly entwines

The universe in its designs—

Un-earthing patterns where no patterns are.



The mind, that termite, seems to shun the sky.

It burrows down,

Tunneling in upon that moment when,

In Time—its element—will come a day

The longest-shadowed tower sway,

Unbroken sunlight fall to earth again.



III. After All



Cheap stock, cheap artwork—everything just

So deliciously cheap! They pull on me still,

Those sci-fi novels of the fifties,

And when in some used bookstore

On a shelf where old futures gather dust

I happen on one I knew before,

Years back, I undergo a little thrill



Of dislocation.

They pulled, originally,

On my father, who housed them in the attic, where

Each startling cover was privately digested

By a boy too young to read: pirate spaceships, and square-

Headed robots with ray guns, and heaving-breasted

Girls lashed in the arms of antennaed aliens …

What a queer place the future would be!



The few facts I knew about outer space

Haunted me. On those other planets, the ground

Hides a different gravity. You might float away

Like a balloon. The stars don’t twinkle. It’s always day,

Up there. And black as night. The dark vacuum

Would suck the air from your face.

If you cried out, there would be no sound.



… All those hours in the attic, devoted

To an eager, uneasy analysis

Of the lurid covers on my father’s shelves,

Left a lingering hunger, even now unfed—

A yearning for a place the books themselves

Couldn’t supply, since (it must be noted)

Most of those books are better left unread.



And yet, now and then over the years,

I’ve picked one up and read it, particularly those

Of the man found more often than any other

In my dad’s ragged collection: the author

Of Old Earth’s Torn Mantle and The Gears

Of History and Big Minutes and Time’s Knock,

Who died one month before the launch of Sputnik.



Like most of his contemporaries,

He interests us for what was not foreseen,

The upheavals he failed to anticipate:

Book after book of his, the white race reigns

Unchallenged, sex is always straight

(But not straightforward), and women are keen

To fix the meals and be the secretaries.



(Oh those tart-tongued but true-blue

Gals of the twenty-first and -second centuries,

Dizzy and desirable as ever! You knew exactly

How they’re dressed without his telling you:

Blazing red lipstick, thick penciled brows,

Off-the-shoulder blouses, skin-tight capris,

Firm girdles and those pointy Fifties bras.)



And yet—of this I feel quite sure—he saw

The one subtending truth compared to which

All others dwindle: our human kind is passing away—

Being replaced—we’re replacing ourselves; we

Are the first species that has consciously

Shifted its ecological niche;

We exempt ourselves from Nature’s law.



DNA was unspooled in the year

I was born, and the test-tube births

Of cloned mammals emerged in a mere

Half-century; it seems the earth’s

Future’s now in the hands of a few

Techies on a caffeinated all-nighter who

Sift the gene-alphabet like Scrabble tiles



And our computer geeks are revealed, at last,

As those quick-handed, sidelined little mammals

In the dinosaurs’ long shadows—those least-

Likely-to-succeed successors whose kingdom come

Was the globe itself (an image best written down,

Perhaps, beneath a streetlamp, late, in some

Star-riddled Midwestern town).



He wrote boys’ books and intuitively

Recognized that the real

Realist isn’t the one who details

Lowdown heartland factories and farms

As if they would last, but the one who affirms,

From the other end of the galaxy,

Ours is the age of perilous miracles.



We’re learning to remake ourselves. We think

We see the danger; therein lies the danger.

The earth moves. It hauls to the light the dark houses

Whose sleepers wake to a dawn wherein

They do not know their children, or their spouses,

And the mirror above the bathroom sink

Returns the fixed, confident gaze of a stranger.