Copyright © David O'Meara, 2013
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in publication
O'Meara, David, 1968-, author
A pretty sight / David O'Meara.
Poems.
eISBN 978-1-77056-359-9
I. Title.
PS8579.M359P74 2013 cC811′.54 C2013-904124-9
For Dorothy
Spoiler Alert
Wood warps.
Glass cracks.
The whole estate
goes for a song.
The cardboard
we used
to box up the sun
didn’t last long.
Occasional
As Poet Laureate of the Moon
I’d like to welcome you
to the opening of the Armstrong Centre
for the Performing Arts. I was asked to prepare
a special verse to mark
this important occasion. And I’d be the first
to confess: the assignment
stumped me. Glancing around my workspace’s
dials and gauges, and the moonscape
through triple hermetic Plexiglas,
I struggled to settle on the proper content
to hard-text into the glow of my thought-screen.
In the progress of art and literature, the moon’s
been as constant a theme as rivers or the glare
of the sun, though even after several bowls
of potent plum wine, a T’ang poet would never
have guessed, addressing this satellite across
the darkness, that someone would ever write back.
The Centre itself, I know, isn’t much;
a duct-lined node bolted to the laboratory,
powered by sectional solar panels mounted
on trusses, parked not far from the first
Apollo landing. We live with bare minimum:
cramped, nutrient-deprived, atrophying
like versions of our perishables
in vacuum-pack. The lack’s made my sleep
more vivid. Last night I dreamt I was in
a pool where cattle hydrated, then
fell tenderly apart in perfect lops of meat.
(I see a few of you nodding there in the back.)
So what good will one room do us? Maybe
none. Maybe this streamlined aluminum
will become our Lascaux, discovered by aliens
ages hence, pressing them to wonder what
our rituals meant, what they said of our hopes and fears.
Somewhere in this lunar grind, in the cratered gap
between survival and any outside meaning,
must be the clue to our humanity, the way
Camus once argued the trouble for Sisyphus
wasn’t the endless failure to prop
a rock atop some hill, but the thoughts
he had on the way back down.
Which brings me to the astronauts of Apollo 11.
After snapping the horizon through the lens
of a single Hasselblad, knowing every boot tread
they left was eternal, they’d squeezed
through the hatch of their landing module, shut
and resealed it for return to Earth,
then discovered, due to cramped space
and the bulk of their spacesuits, they’d crushed
the switch for the ascent engine. The rockets failed
to activate. So Buzz Aldrin used part of a pen
to trigger the damaged breaker, toggling until
it fired the sequence for launch. This
was the quiet work of his engineer’s mind.
He kept the pen for the rest of his years,
which is another kind of thinking, akin to that
slight pivoting, as Camus would call it,
when we glance backward over our lives.
What we keep in the pause between facts
might be the beginning of art. Which is where
we are in this room tonight. I’ll have to stop there;
the teleprompter is flashing for wrap-up. Following
tonight’s program, I’m happy to announce
an extra ration of Natural Form and H2O
will be served by the airlock. I think
you’re in for quite a show. So hold on
to your flight diapers as we cue the dancers
who’ve timed their performance to the backdrop
of Earthrise. There it is now in the tinted
north viewpoint. Look at that, folks. To think
they still find bones of dinosaurs there.
Background Noise
Home, my coat just off, the back room
murky and static, like the side altar of a church, so at first
I don’t know what I hear:
one low, sustained, electronic note
keening