I just got home a little while ago from a poetry workshop I led this evening, outside, at a local park near a lake, face-to-face. Of course, all the poets were safely distanced. It was beautiful, warm, sunny, and pretty much bug-free.
Today is World. U. F. O. Day, so, in honor of this face, I planned an evening of all things cosmic and poetic. Aliens and moons, abductions and invasions. It was wonderfully and miraculously strange.
And for that, Saint Marty gives thanks.
Here is something I wrote this evening that I'm not too ashamed of . . .
Big Bang
by: Martin Achatz
My dad hunted with Kevin,
Uncle Kevie, to us,
a man hard as slag rock
who used to fish
with dynamite he stole
from the mines, threw it
into the lake, let it pound
trout out of the water
like the hungry
fist of God.
Kevin drank a lot,
so much that Poncho,
the local grocer, paid
for his annual Yosemite
trips with Kevin's beer money.
July 20, 1973, at a campfire,
Uncle Kevie looked up
through pine branches, searched
for something. When he found it,
he took a pull
from the long brown neck
of his beer, declared,
"It's my birthday."
Uncle Kevie never drew
attention to himself, avoided
it like Sunday church. He stared
up at the bright sickle
of moon. His ice-blue irises
swam with fire. He nodded.
"I remember it. That day."
He pressed his lips together.
"Nineteen sixty-nine."
He pulled on his beer again.
"They walked on that."
Raised his bottle, pointed.
"On my birthday. Today."
He smiled. He never smiled.
I saw Uncle Kevie draw inward,
the space around him collapse.
Then he started to expand,
getting bigger, bigger,
reaching out and out,
spinning, spinning
over Europa, Ganymede,
leaping Fornax, Lyra, Lupus
chasing Cigar, Pinwheel
toward a distant somewhere
at the edge of comets, stars, moons
where no boot had ever stepped.
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