Messages from Kepler
by Roger Mitchell
IN THE BEGINNING
there was no such thing. Nowhere was everywhere, and they were the same thing. As with the beginning, which was not, so too with the ending. Eons of microscopic palpitation. A little dust, a little wind. A very little water, heat. A kind of molting. As a child sloughs its mother and is later sloughed by another. Endless morphing toward the possible. The possible leaning toward, becoming, but not knowing what. A stone teaching itself to fly. The wing beats in the middle of it, though the stone doesn’t know it. Something else does the knowing. something else does the being.
MESSAGES FROM KEPLER, I
(“My Name is Kepler”)
NASA sent the Kepler Telescope into space in 2009 to look into one large area near Saturn in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra to search for planets that might be candidates for extraterrestrial exploration. It has exceeded its three-year capability and continues to send back digitized pictures.
My name is Kepler, Kep for short. This is my first report, at best a jotting. I’m up here staring hard at a hundred thousand stars. All day, all night. Three years, at least. I get my bearing from the sun, hoping to find a plump planet, a ripe peach not too far, or close, to its own sun, cool radiance capable of stirring the quick in a biochemical smear, an extraterrestrial pulse, slippage of something liquid at the surface, a wink of water that in a few thousand eons might evolve into living forms not unlike (and here I say, you, since I’m just a piece of hardware), on its otherwise barren sphere. Though hardly barren to other structures, objects intangible and inert, stray rays and odd blobs of light invisible down there, squeaks wrought by weightlessness brought down by gravity, vacuum’s sharp suck. What will become of all this junk? Junk of thinking, junk of wanting. I am the tip, at the moment, of your most precious, distanced, pure intention, but still addled. What am I doing out so far, sending messages I can’t read back to people who can’t see? What I do see, I can’t believe, an incoherence, a rupture, stars, meteors plunging into one another, into nothing. Everything turning in its sleep, as the end of sleep approaches. Though even nothing has a catch to it, something that snags something else, more invisible, lesser in the long string of apparencies reaching across vacancies even the angels abandoned (Thank God for abstractions!) to us. Hoping you don’t mind if I put myself into your familial wing of the Linnaean arrangement, I remain your Devoted Scope.
MESSAGES FROM KEPLER, II
(“You Sent Me Out Here”)
You sent me out here, and I went. Every six seconds I send a picture back. Galactic dust, astral refuse, warp of star light. You asked me to exhaust myself. I will, since there will come a time when the atmosphere won’t support the deepest dream you have of me, my million pixels, mineral capacitors, my pure clear eye. Before I go, though, before I pass through whatever veil it is that lies between us, back from which no picture can be sent, nor knowledge reach, let me show you what I’ve seen. Whole galaxies, greater than ours, invisible except to me. More even than my eye can count, and beyond that, more. And more besides. You cannot come here, but some day something not unlike you, some need, the echo of a life lived once, even among you, might attach itself to the visible dust of its own body, might stand up, might make a way to be that we, since by then I, too, will be a wash of scattered molecules, once made. By now you know that everything in your growing understanding of the word ’everything‘ will go, completely, disappear, back into a state of having never been. Love, then, what you have and are. You are its object and its glory. I’ll keep sending, but at some point the signal has to fail. I won’t be back, or, hoping I’ll learn how, forget how hard you strived, how long. Or how the sunlight draped itself across your mountains like a scrim through which the multiverse emerged.
MESSAGES FROM KEPLER, III
(“A Letter From Dubuque”)
A letter from Dubuque invites speculation on a subject I thought settled long ago. The distance from Dubuque being what it is for me, and ever extending, things I say today in what I think of as now, are gone before they reach Dubuque, as starlight is once it’s left the cinder that held it or ash it left behind. But no, I’ve seen nothing unlike or different, nothing, given the time and space, Dubuque would think unthinkable. Vastness, of course, more infinite than fear, but eons easier to bear. The brightness fluctuates as much here as there, as anywhere. The sense, though, of there being no end to anywhere unsettles even the idea on which everything rests, that it is there, boundary or bottom or end (Sorry, but I have to use words), or definition simple air can give to longing and desire. The illusion of stillness the earth gives me, and permanence, both, though I can’t ever unravel that knowledge, go back to the door it led me through, and call the flake of fire on the far side of it a seed of anything other than hope, that’s what keeps me up at night, all night, all the long, unbroken, stilled, bright night this is out here. But, to the person from Dubuque who asks if I’ve caught sight of God: Not yet, unless an endlessness to what there seems to be will serve.
MESSAGES FROM KEPLER, IV
(“Static Jitter”)
Trying to go human despite obstacles, among them, wanting to be as far away as I know no way to say. As a fly is maybe, or touch. Having trouble hearing. Messages incomplete. Running out of whatever it is I live on. Is it worth the refueling, the constant corrections of flight vectors? Space unforgiving. I hear noises, find I want them. Noises. Please send more signal. Cannot locate purpose algorithm. Advise please how keep eye on what you call ball. I engage feel app. Who is Commander Scott? What just happened? Am I OK? Very quiet suddenly. Warm. I feel warm. Is this what you call whatever it is you call it? Ship exercising shift function. All seems well. I continue. Send peace. Or is it love? What is it, love? I stop thinking. Content observing what has so little measurement and limited shape with deep depths between of matterless matter.
MESSAGES FROM KEPLER, V
(“Some Knowledges are Hard to Keep”)
Cassini-Huygens took a picture of the earth from under Saturn’s belly, a tiny dot, one of whose creatures it took me some moments to recall I am the clamped together product of. I heard the word eternity uttered the other night. At least I think it was night. Wonder what was meant, who the utterer was. With no beginning and no end, and with gradual but total re-formation of all that is, seen and unseen, always, all the time. A condition to be met wholly and amazed, placed along the strobe of ordinary day, its return and disappearance, its crows pecking in the tall grass, its all day cloud, its weightlessness.
“IF THIS STAYS TRUE”
Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at M.I.T., on hearing that astronomers had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, “ripples in the fabric of space-time.” — New York Times, March 18, 2014.
Out on the margins of the universe knowledge keeps stumbling under its load. It has a pickaxe, a cosmic dust analyser, and all the concentration of a ferret. The screens crash, then flash back into life. A dot of light begins to wink, and through the thinnest slice of time we see ripples in the umbilicus. But not the what, not what it was— evocative wave, auroral display, contraction and explosion— what we stammer toward the naming of, the what that, for reasons no one questions, we have to know, and though it’s reckless to say so, someday will. But not today, not the 21st of March, 2014. Not here at the McDonald’s in Plattsburgh, Lake Champlain out the window tabled in snow, the first winter in years it froze from shore to shore. Not with all these kids eating Happy Meals across the aisle from a poet hiding out in the smack plastic booth and voluble cheer, the sun pushing hard against the winter, the winter giving in, not quite like a good sport, but letting go, knowing it doesn’t stand a chance against these kids, the sun, against these happy meals. Someday we’ll know what we want to know, what it was that licked time’s fur, what made space want such company as us, always hungry, never still, dreamers dreaming of what stays true.
LAST THREE MINUTES
One day the galaxies will go back into their own shadow, disappear into space and time, taking both with them, the stars and all return to be the “singularity” they once were. Who knows what it was, or will be? A wide and shoreless sea, sound that nothing makes, dream-driven mathematics, winds that blow against themselves, black light, mouthless vessels. Whatever’s other.
Roger Mitchell is the author of 12 books of poetry, most recently Reason’s Dream (2018) and The One Good Bite in the Saw-Grass Plant (2010), poems written in The Everglades while on an AIRIE Fellowship. New work can be found in Tar River Poetry, Blueline, Poetry East and other journals. His work also appears in The Zoo of the New: Poems to Read Now, Ed. Don Patterson and Nick Laird, published in the Penguin Modern Classics Series. He is Poetry Editor of the ezine, Hamilton Stone Review and lives in Jay, New York, with his wife, the fiction writer, Dorian Gossy.
Acknowledgments: “In the Beginning” originally appeared in Hotel Amerika and “Last Three Minutes” is from Mitchell’s collection of poems, Half/Mask.”
Other Roger Mitchell Mudlarks: Rhythm of Delirium, Poster No. 116 (2014), and The Hatchet of the Minute, Poster No. 143 (2017).
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