Europa

Tripping through the genesis doors,
The sudden blue suddenly black and
The mutinous light ever retina bound and
The violent strobe and the microwave echo:
What intelligence, what thing, what weaver
Of string observes the footfalls,
Stands at the switch flicking
Flicking silence and thunderless lightning,
The silence in the spaces of Pascal?
Do not be deceived by
The nonchalance of it all;
By the eloquence of man.

Heroic astrobiologists, neocosmologists,
In caves or domes sequestered
With your tiny eye
And your giant eye
What peace, what toast proposed
From the yet core-plundered grail?
In which dish wilt thou dip thy dirty hand?

Into the bulging eye of Mauna Kea
Stream the quantum waves of Noah
Where children of the Cyclops fetch
Buckets of starlight from the wells
And sifting are divining lambda
In countless grains of ether.

Off to Europa, off!
Gather ye up ye pagans ye kafrs ye deists
New and old
The neopagans droved
Like cattle across the flatness
Along the curving
Past the steadiness or expansion
Through the virile the sterile black vacuum - mush!
Armageddon or the Anti-Armageddon
Threatens, or either beckons.

Gather up quickly in lots
Of three and four and twenty
And exit through the blood-stained doors
With your blueprints, algorithms,
Double-helix architectures
To the breast clutched close
Like madmen in a gale their manifestos.

But there will be there will not be
No Peter there
No key no gate no scrutiny
No shards of flint no bits of bronze no enamel chips
No marbles scrolls tablets;
No bones.
The indefatigable search for the old arc
Is over: Rejoice.
Rejoice ye therefore in the shadow of the
New arc.

Remember the earnestness, the innocence
Of the eight-year-old falling over her
New words like new skates?
O conversations with enormous adults!
Who hammered dogma like Roman nails,
Spoke of lions in the coliseums
And are dead now,
Tiny atoms in the transferred
Batons still shaking in our hands

While we run like wild horses
Through the broken Eden
Toward the unfinished line
Toward the sound and fury
Of tomorrow.

What anecdotes of faith redemption
What parables what narrative now
For the pristine ears outstretched
Like new spinnakers?
The unlined faces braced
Like so many Mayflowers at full sail.
Who will preach the sermon of Microbial Adam?
Mitochondrial Eve?
Usurpers of the serpent unbeguiled
While beguiling: So much hissing
In a bucket of starlight.

We will translate the silence of the interred bones
They will they will not
Speak the red-lettered words again.
And the billion-year-old days -
Is it four or five or six now before the resting?
- are being inventoried
By law.
By law we say.
It is underway.

More glorious core samples to come!
More forays against the giggling hyperthermophiles
Back in favor like a shaky Leakey.

I lament the Mars water to come.
I embrace the Mars water to come,
The mocking fertility in the stones to come.

Nor via Elysium nor Valhalla nor Tartarus
Listen! Nor Heaven nor Paradise
Though up from the Hadean
Furnace will we rise
Resurrected out of Chaos in the glory
Of our Titanic single cell
Ascending to applause of microbes.
Who is listening to me?
Who is listening?

To whom or what am I speaking?
To the bones only?
To the undreaming strings only?
To the copper coins masking
The rotted eyes only?
What closed loop is this?
What self-hypnotism?
Is this the new cannibalism the lens-people wage:
To eat the bones only?

Foolish Moses who did not jump
Into the burning bush
And the plagiarists of Zeno
Who built an empire upon a shipwreck
And called it Man:
Behold: here then is your son
Lost in the labyrinthine days -
What?

And Davies and the rest lie a new Prometheus
To give us flame and smoke
From the campfire of the chemotroph;
And chaplain Dawkins with seer Darwin:
A new Zeus grafted stoic as a stone,
Aglow immaculate behind the thin flames.
Go then
With Moses jump.

By Virgil and Beatrice abandoned,
The lost redemption scraped from the thin pages
The lost redemption chiseled from the beams,
Charon, alone, by us abandoned:
O we can skip across
The barren riverbed ourselves
Happy as the children of Aesop.
Who is listening?

Who will teach us lead us guide us?
Who can speak that was not first a chromosome?
To that only will I listen
And gather up my kind
Confront embrace the silence
The silence that so frightened Pascal
Silence that terrifies the wavered wavering-
Wait! Where is Spong, the electronic Bishop?
What does Spong say?
I heard him speak once, calm voice above the din
And then the serotonin misfired
And more paroxetine was required
And the lens-people sighed
And the tomorrows began to fall like dominoes
Clicking clicking past the jettisoned silence
Toward the redemptionless blackness
Of the broken strobe.

The hydrogen is ready, sir:
We are standing by.

Off to Europa, off!
O what an exodus!
O onward ho to the new earth
The old earth that was
The new earth to come
Off toward the darkness
Of the deafening click
Toward the silence
Toward the blackness
And the madness
The madness

The madness.


© Rhett Talley 2004