Orrery. Donna Kane
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href="#u9bf84b41-376e-5af2-b5b0-6999014c1f82">Nomenclature 77
5 Bio 80
Each year, the Earth diminishes by one one-hundredth of a human blood cell, the moon moves four centimetres away. The distance between me and the International Space Station is less than between my deck and Prince George. You can tell it’s a space station by the way it glides, a silver bead skimming its equation eastward. A faint echo, it’s true—but real nonetheless— of the deer, caught in my headlights then arcing away, my 25 trillion blood cells seized in Surprise! Surprise!
I
Oh Be a Fine Girl, Kiss Me
after Annie Jump Cannon’s spectral star classification system (OBAFGKM)
I’d rather feel the heft of a photographic plate, watch silver salts precipitate the split light of stars, spectral bands confessing the gas and ore of my glittering valves and ventricles. I can’t say what goes on in my sleep, but when I wake? My mind reaches out, not inward, for its bearings. As if whatever grounds me draws from a great distance.
March 2, 1972, Forecast for Northern BC
Pioneer 10 will be the first to measure the Galilean fields, granola the first thing I’ll eat while the wind smacks kissers of snow against the double-glazed panes and moose brave the yard for the lower limbs of the weeping birch. While at first we circled, now we’ll settle. I could have been a dancer, a stunt double, and you, Pioneer 10, a pop can, a pie plate, a gear driving the orrery of all you sail beyond.
When you launch, it will be minus-thirty, mostly cloudy. What goes up will stay up, become the first earthly thing with mass set to outlast the flutter board, the pickle jar, the fear of death and all our diminishing dramas.
Dear Pioneer 10
Further to our meeting, we confirm we do not plan to contact you again.
As stated, after twelve billion kilometres and thirty years, you are not so much old, as beyond our jurisdiction.
As well, the original contract was twenty-one months. You’ve exceeded that. While we commend you on your work ethic, enough is enough.
You were the first human-built object to pass through the asteroid belt. That’s something to be proud of, no?
We realize you are in deep space and the next star in your trajectory is a two-million-year journey, but we feel the loneliness is ours. As they say, To be is to be perceived.
Listen. You knew what this was. There are rabbit ears in my basement with the same complaint as you.
Your silence isn’t keeping us up.
Letter to the Scientists at the Ames Research Center
What a way to leave Florida— an aluminum bloom hot enough to pop corn after three scrubbed launches and thinning crowds. Past belts of rock chips, I knew you were tense as parents with your shirts starched white as Styrofoam cups, smoking non-stop as I circumnavigated the dark side of Jupiter before zipping back letters, then shooting off for good. My batteries dimmed, your hearing strained, I know I still haunt the glow of your night lights, and you know the data on your pulsing blue screens is not how things appear to me.
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot
The Great Red Spot is in it for itself, is never homesick, fuels maelstrom with maelstrom, gas with gas. Like awareness, it answers nothing. It does not feel as old as it is. It waits for an opening, like a sliding puzzle’s missing tile, an absence that allows the other tiles to move, so storms grow calm, gas turns solid, and it becomes something else.
Depiction of a Man and a Woman on the Pioneer 10 Space Probe Plaque
If a representation of a man with a penis and a woman without a vagina is hurtling at twenty clicks a second away from Earth and makes contact with an alien who thinks just as we do, so admires the woman’s hairdo but gets the method of procreation wrong, well, it won’t be by accident, will it?
The man, I must say, is anatomically lovely and I like how his raised hand illustrates the opposable thumb while doubling as a sign of goodwill. But would it have killed us to add a short line for her cleft? To make her an artifact, not space junk, mound of Venus with a Brazilian wax job instead of Barbie made by Mattel?
They say Greek statuary omits it, but come on, we talk about being safe, then spend our days splitting the atom. In the time it takes me to write snatch, the impression’s a further three hundred miles away. The chances of correction are nil. When the Earth’s fried to a crisp the plaque will carry on: ambassador of the easily offended, the quickly aroused.
It hopes you will understand.
The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You
Its shadow’s been gone since liftoff but it took light disappearing before lonely seemed simply alone, or if not alone then deep in the lab of the not understood, the no-human-scent in its gold dust, the no soot-darkened brows incandescent with plutonium.
Shed of silver, quick, small—our ideas burning off like surplus fuel—Pioneer 10 is a thought clicked shut. Limbs drawn in, it drops like a tick from the brain’s limbic core, like a photon travelling who knows how long before it reaches a body, the way the mind needs an object, something to crack open on, and by its reflection, shine.
Pioneer 10, I Hear You
The man who throws his coat over a chair believes in his future. Should I tell him to hang it up so if he trips on the stairs, belief doesn’t turn to despair?
Is that what I believe?
That every belief is a fear of its opposite, that the man who trusts he will go back outside is afraid he won’t, and I, who believe in nothing,
am in fact worried I’ll miss every updraft to rapture as surely as acceleration times mass equals thrust? And that would be true. I would not
want to be without kin: Pioneer 10 aimed toward absolute zero, communication lost on the first summery day of the year when we were