Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in publication

      O'Meara, David, 1968-, author

      A pretty sight / David O'Meara.

      Poems.

      eISBN 978-1-77056-359-9

      I. Title.

      PS8579.M359P74 2013 cC811′.54 C2013-904124-9

      For Dorothy

      Spoiler Alert

      Wood warps.

      Glass cracks.

      The whole estate

      goes for a song.

      The cardboard

      we used

      to box up the sun

      didn’t last long.

      Occasional

      As Poet Laureate of the Moon

      I’d like to welcome you

      to the opening of the Armstrong Centre

      for the Performing Arts. I was asked to prepare

      a special verse to mark

      this important occasion. And I’d be the first

      to confess: the assignment

      stumped me. Glancing around my workspace’s

      dials and gauges, and the moonscape

      through triple hermetic Plexiglas,

      I struggled to settle on the proper content

      to hard-text into the glow of my thought-screen.

      In the progress of art and literature, the moon’s

      been as constant a theme as rivers or the glare

      of the sun, though even after several bowls

      of potent plum wine, a T’ang poet would never

      have guessed, addressing this satellite across

      the darkness, that someone would ever write back.

      The Centre itself, I know, isn’t much;

      a duct-lined node bolted to the laboratory,

      powered by sectional solar panels mounted

      on trusses, parked not far from the first

      Apollo landing. We live with bare minimum:

      cramped, nutrient-deprived, atrophying

      like versions of our perishables

      in vacuum-pack. The lack’s made my sleep

      more vivid. Last night I dreamt I was in

      a pool where cattle hydrated, then

      fell tenderly apart in perfect lops of meat.

      (I see a few of you nodding there in the back.)

      So what good will one room do us? Maybe

      none. Maybe this streamlined aluminum

      will become our Lascaux, discovered by aliens

      ages hence, pressing them to wonder what

      our rituals meant, what they said of our hopes and fears.

      Somewhere in this lunar grind, in the cratered gap

      between survival and any outside meaning,

      must be the clue to our humanity, the way

      Camus once argued the trouble for Sisyphus

      wasn’t the endless failure to prop

      a rock atop some hill, but the thoughts

      he had on the way back down.

      Which brings me to the astronauts of Apollo 11.

      After snapping the horizon through the lens

      of a single Hasselblad, knowing every boot tread

      they left was eternal, they’d squeezed

      through the hatch of their landing module, shut

      and resealed it for return to Earth,

      then discovered, due to cramped space

      and the bulk of their spacesuits, they’d crushed

      the switch for the ascent engine. The rockets failed

      to activate. So Buzz Aldrin used part of a pen

      to trigger the damaged breaker, toggling until

      it fired the sequence for launch. This

      was the quiet work of his engineer’s mind.

      He kept the pen for the rest of his years,

      which is another kind of thinking, akin to that

      slight pivoting, as Camus would call it,

      when we glance backward over our lives.

      What we keep in the pause between facts

      might be the beginning of art. Which is where

      we are in this room tonight. I’ll have to stop there;

      the teleprompter is flashing for wrap-up. Following

      tonight’s program, I’m happy to announce

      an extra ration of Natural Form and H2O

      will be served by the airlock. I think

      you’re in for quite a show. So hold on

      to your flight diapers as we cue the dancers

      who’ve timed their performance to the backdrop

      of Earthrise. There it is now in the tinted

      north viewpoint. Look at that, folks. To think

      they still find bones of dinosaurs there.

      Background Noise

      Home, my coat just off, the back room

      murky and static, like the side altar of a church, so at first

      I don’t know what I hear:

      one low, sustained, electronic note

      keening