Science
The night sky purples, bruised like blackberries
By the heavy heart of summer and the crackle
Of convection dancing across the ocean sheen,
On the cusp of the storm that hasn’t come.
My fingers flirt with the sticky mist on the Capsule.
Dripping with wires and vacuum packed like sprat,
We plunge, blanched in the frost cut with foam,
And sink into the metal raptures of nitrogen narcosis.
We shear a pillar of plant; its kraken sway
Flourishes like angel-hair pasta and sheds the
Scales of its snakeskin. That was the talk of
Many miles as we measure the oxygen in
Fathoms, the rock in faces and the beasts in
Constellations. From down here, the tides
Lustfully fattened by the young moon,
Are just wrinkles on the membrane of Noah’s skin.
We ritualise the silent treatment, flick and flex
Alien fingers over the controls, trawl for samples,
Carve the contours of continents onto the map and
Bring out the Travel Scrabble for the ends of the Earth.
They have huge mouths, ridged with a sierra skyline of
Rugged mountain arêtes. They soak up the wake and the
Breach of our submersible– mottled with new neon on spidery
Bones– absorbing the white smoulder of our starry diodes.
And back again, we invade the blue film of inversion, see
The hot flush of sunset and stroll, shirts and skins, with the
Mars mission parade. All around us, the human canon passes
Into the past and a little more daylight is a little more to learn.
