Boom
Here am I
boots digging a terrain of drought
eyes fixed beyond the pigeon-peppered sky,
the cumuli, toxicants,
adagios of passenger jets transporting disease and pregnancies worldwide,
(no different than argosies, rum-oozing mustaches,
hens and mules peeing beneath the deck,
and laughter around the galley table,
pricks burning from forays into Tortuga´s stews),
staring past the blicking and splurry of satellites and stratospheric wreckage,
my gaze flung beyond the argent fields of moon now
cluttered with flag, footprints,
looking past the dust-storms on Mars,
the forest of radiation flowers, specks of helium, dust,
my eyeballs roll across one
rubble of iron, carbonaceous gulches, boulders of nickel, black
ice, silicon,
rocky steppes with microscope scripture, fossilized bacterium,
fields with flour-fine soil, buried
virus from eons ago, thawing;
I see the asteroid hurtling towards Earth,
how I ask,
lift up my arms to the smog,
how I beg, plea,
fall on us,
carbonize this stump of a life-post,
fall on us,
splutter of star, spit-flicker of grace,
fall on us,
C-type cosmic boulder the girth of Utah,
fall on us
with your slush surface valleys of carbonate clay,
your shape of mosquito needle parried for feeding,
fall on us
with water vapor tresses flowing behind you,
your smoking buttes that crumble and smash
smithereens of orbiting rubble,
fall on us
onrush of rabble and stone teeth, crystal nails,
guts of gust and grit furrowing through oceans,
fall on us
downpour of oil and magma squeezed from the red-inflamed teat of heavens,
spray me, douse me, smoke
me and hiss
for thy lover comes!
**
The asteroid will come
caked in regolith, carbonaceous, oil-black,
visible for days,
then combusting, fire-rain of rubble as
it approaches our globe,
bloodshot, veined with lightning,
bluehot corolla, yellowish afterimage and contrail whiter than vapor
from a vat on the stovetop,
and it too shall beautiful
like Sodom carbonized, smoke across the plains, vapor
as from the opened door of kiln,
and the statue:
svelte reunion of
corrosive salt, crystalloids,
acetate, chiseled
into a petrified scream.
Mushroom-clouds, tidal waves, fire hurricane
and shockwave
global.
**
I am that virus,
hived in meteorite,
rubble of a proto-planet
which collided with an errant
globe a million years ago;
a virus,
propelled via
cosmic hunger,
and the curvature of gravity,
my origin
now a swarm
of rocks hurtling thru
interplanetary vacancies
where specks of helium
and dust feed my crystallized
dreams with promised
proteins and plasmas hot
as tides heaving
beneath the sulfur dioxide crust on the outer moons,
I exist in a semi-dormant state,
venomous & poised,
which terrestrial mammals
and insects cannot emulate;
hens and mules peeing beneath the deck,
a virus,
jagged & pronged,
elementary & ancient,
ravenous,
I resist the radiation,
the broil & freeze of deep space,
which only serve to hone
my parasitic claws,
as I thaw
or freeze crystal-shaped;
a virus,
pure hunger,
fangs chiseled for human DNA
or microbial life
seething beneath the burnt-
sienna lineae crisscrossing
the ice-smooth surface of Europa;
a virus
encased in this rock
that might crackle & splitter thru
a tenuous atmosphere plunging
into the salty water
on one of Jupiter’s moon
and ravage the life cycle
of black smokers clinging
to deep oceanic
hydrothermal belts where
no light feeds them,
nor is needed,
only the scald and
extreme pressure,
that would implode the bones
and boil the marrow
of those beings who believe
in simple physics,
the conjugation of verbs
which only propagate the oracle
of linear time & determinism,
or to plummet into
sulfur plumes blasting and
snaking past the gravitational
escape velocity of a moon
forever facing the bloody hurricane on Jupiter,
and then burn
hundreds of miles
above the volcanoes
Prometheus, Tvashtar,
which spew & purge
the brimstone phantom & howl
of Io,
a moon of cataclysmic & ghostly gnashing;
a virus
obeying only velocity
and gravity,
hurtling across the jagged
fields of the Kuiper belt,
where spheres of methane & nitrogen
combust and smash
without a sound into
metallic meteoroids,
bastions of amino acids,
to populate Martian siroccos,
or pollute watery globes
with carbon-based thirst & life cycles,
or to hunker into the non-carbon chemistries
on biospheres eons
beyond the edge of solar wind,
and colonize silicon-based
microscopic entities,
destroying them,
inside-out, littering a
myriad husks across a terrain
blue as propane, under a twin-
solar sky where the air is red;
a virus,
whose trajectory thru space
is subject to gravitational tugs,
the texture,
the granules,
the light-absorbent hue
of balsat fragment which once
might have formed into a planet
with reptilian life squirming
thru porous rocks heated by hot springs &
a thick, wet atmosphere,
legg’d serpents & red toads
I would burn
and colonize;
a virus
seething
in a rock
that might spin for billions of years
until it explodes into the atmosphere
of a globe awash in blue ether,
spluttering into fragments,
a myriad of us,
a locust-swarm of viral sparks,
peopling dunes, forests and mud
with our blind hunger, our
itch & dig into
a new jungle of helixes,
in order to latch on
to proteins and reproduce,
annihilate, destroy
the host, and then
hibernate
when there are no bloodstreams
left in which to incubate
our fire & fury,
more vivid than
the flame-tinctured wings of seraphim.
Anthony Seidman’s poetry and translations have recently been published, or are forthcoming, in Huizache, Modern Poetry In Translation, Chiron Review, World Literature Today, The Bitter Oleander, among others. Eyewear Publishing of London will published his latest collection of poetry, Cosmic Weather, & Other Climates, later this year.
