Nels Hanson
After Copernicus
In shielded safe within a lead-lined box placed
by darkest night down deepest shaft of Earth’s
most penetrating mine the golden light emitted
powerful rays attracting wings, a thousand owls,
bats diving blind through waves of Gypsy moths
thick as starlings so men wearing black-visored
helmets lifted with crane the container weighing
tons but holding less than one full pound of flesh.
Dogs and deer chased a special lead-tarped truck
rushing to fast ship waiting just in case, destroyer
pursued by barking seals and steaming for South
Pacific, the Mariana Trench, murky floor thirty-five
thousand feet below the surface, mile deeper
than Everest is high. On dazzling TV screens we
watched square cargo fall like streaking shooting
star into water flaring to cyclone of light as navy dark
sea turned palest turquoise green of shallow
ocean inside island reefs. Alarms, sonar warning
horns blared, from every compass point arrived
fish and whales, sharks with jaws clamped tight
overtaking blue tuna schools, dolphins racing for
abandoned gold. Light kept propagating, rings of
tsunami tides threatening to set ablaze the globe’s
dull shores. Coiling miles of cable the craft sailed
tepidly through milling terrapin, rare giant squid,
transparent jellies with luminescent clouds adrift
in clear-domed skies, prow parting brimming life
as slow arctic breakers prod trails in ice. Pharaoh’s
Ship of the Sun voyaging, great bonfire on a royal
raft rowed by ghostly oarsmen, the Grateful Dead?
India and Africa abaft, Atlantic to Cape Canaveral
hull like a sieve shed piercing glow, armored hold
a hedgehog’s ball of yellow spines. Veteran crew
in asbestos suits, hoods of executioners, welders’
goggles transferred the package to puffing rocket
blasting now for space, circle of its burners’ fire
eclipsed by shine of missile’s payload until stars,
moon dimmed and already morning came. Over
shocked horizons crazed suns born prematurely?
After days becoming weeks a constellated night
returned, at last the flaming heart appearing one
noon from who knows where why no one knows
was bound into the void and we were saved, no
longer vulnerable to burning passion of love to
only live for love as each heart ignites in single
self-consuming flash light years brighter than all
exploding novas and Dark Ages late our planet
illumines a universe in perfect order circling us.
