Voyager 1 in the Termination Shock

When you leave the sky you don't become a new sky,

don't spike to cloud or dust-slushed nebula,

violently pink in pillars of shine.

When you leave you don't become the leaving,

don't carry the rapture of rupture.

There's no map to unfold,

no destination, no crease to smooth

from stocking or hem.

Instead, you slum inside your own cool

body, your body a coffin,

your going a star on some old flag

as still and empty as the moon.

The last great explorers were compass and loneliness,

telescope turned towards blooms of light

hammered from the sturdy dark.

Their straw-stuffed bodies folded over tin

cans and their own small portions of fire.

Embers blush and blush, waiting

to be strangled by the air.

I wish my solitude were an avenging machine,

the type that hums low and steady,

cutting through quicks of god and distance.

I wish my solitude were a black hole,

one that could memorize

the solar system's egg-shaped heft,

the sun a bright yolk about to break,

and me, the breaking thing.

I wish my solitude were an hour of honey

and light scattered sharp,

an instrument to measure the white

burn of rash and judgment.

If I am how the message must be sent,

etched in stubborn and gold,

let me burn in my bright landscape,

in my night that sings and sings and sings—

copyright© Jessica Rae Bergamino. First published in West Branch issue 79 (2015), republished by Poetry Daily 9/3/2015

 

 

 

 

 

Curator's Notes: Meg Day

I have long said that the poet’s closest living relative must be the astronaut, so it’s no surprise that I’m smitten with Jessica Rae Bergamino’s poetics of interstellar subjectivity.

What could be more profoundly fulfilling & wildly devastating than traveling to space & then returning to earth? Never returning at all. Bergamino mines this poem with a kind of effortless reverence that few could successfully extend to space probes or other such things containing radioisotope thermoelectric generators. And yet, there it is—Voyager 1—tender as they come. I am weightless when I read this poem, & yet so incredibly heavy with grief—for me, there is no greater feat.