December 2024
Bio Note: This month's optional theme reminded me of my college winters miserably failing to keep warm with the help of a space heater. And then I thought of the coldness of space. And then of the many poems I've written which were partly or entirely inspired by 20th century space exploration. Here are two.
For the Muttniks
For all the Russian space dogs, but mostly for the Christmas 1960 Vostok
muttniks—whose rocket failed, plummeting them back through the atmosphere—
to crash-land in waist-high Siberian snows and brutal cold, with the self-
destruct clock ticking down.
Come Tsygan, come Dezik. Come Dezik a second time,
& come Lisa, although this trip we will lose you both: so sorry!
Come second-Lisa, come Smelaya, who will flee
on the eve of the launch, out into the cold.
But who will be found, & fly. (Go Bolik, who will run & not be.)
Hail Laika, first globe-girdler! Who will overheat & die: so sorry.
Hail, Belka & Strelka: up, round, & back again. Come be
our flag-tongued proxies. Wag & woof in the face of night & time.
A toast to Damka & Zhulka, brave Vostok dogs. Behold
the moon on her sleigh of clouds to guide your way.
Come all you sister street dogs of cold
Moscow, to sing them safe from the sky. Because, woe! their flight
has failed. Their eject has failed. They are out of time;
are fire-splashed somewhere in the Siberian snows. And may be,
or are now, toast. So sorry…
But soon, what good, glad news we'll wake to: ohoo, what glorias.
The crankily ecstatic, the whole-souled
yeehaw of the impossibly alive: yowling your saved names
& all you've seen of this world & out of it at the Krasnoyarsk cold.
first published in Sand, and collected in Mutt Spirituals
Vladimir in April
Vladimir Komarov was the first two-mission cosmonaut, and the first,
in April 1967, to die on a mission. The launch was expedited to
celebrate the Soviet Union’s 50th anniversary. A famous photograph
shows five Russian dignitaries paying respects to his charred remains.
It has been told, & denied, & whispered anyway:
that he died screaming curses at the politicians
who put him in this piece of crap ship, when he had told them
what it was a piece of—as Gagarin had; who screamed Let me fly
in his place & die for him. Because whoever flew would die.
But what a politician requests, a politician
requires. A commemoration; a spectacular one; don’t die:
curse Brezhnev’s name. Or that was the whisper anyway.
In truth, though, Komarov was battling too hard not to die
to curse or to have breath to scream. It’s the molten
gnarl of his remains—like dung bits blackened with flies
clodded about a charred fetus—that makes us wish he had.
But from hope & habit he held true. And when he died anyway,
he died as you & I may die:
politely; raging at nothing & no one; not even the politicians
whose fault it all is or whatever passes for a god they serve—
but in fealty to the contours of a life: to the lie
& native loveliness of a land; & the earth darkening under us;
& the flag even of dreams we draped too tight to fly.
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