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You found my rocky body somewhere in the Tundra, under a mountain of snow sheets and pillow cases. You carbon dated my fingers, toes, and iron hair, to find I'm older than the solar system, but younger than the Milky Way. Created from rich hydrogen, p-p chain reaction of stars spit me out, I am radiating thousand year half-lives. You determine that I came from the Oort Cloud, icy region sometimes perturbed by a nearby star, hurled toward your sun, hyperbolic path, collided with earth. Found frozen yet still whole for research. |
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My voice is out there like a radio transmission, Doppler shifted, reddened a bit, riding on a wave front. When I say I love you to my lover, I cry. Usually, our bodies are sticky with sweat. He sleeps deep in my candle lit bed-cave, while my mind combines face- shadows of prior lovers. My voice is traveling a space trail separated by one year, two weeks, eight months until this message floats-- a compression of air, sound propelling itself through a dark cavernous medium. I picture gobs of goo beings in Andromeda at my frequency. Bored with the same message, a repetition of waveform. Do they know what it means? Because somewhere in the vacuum after climax, words reach my tongue, reflexively I speak them, without knowing the transmission code. |
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He appears to me, simultaneously with the smell of sulfurous flint, and a flickering, a touching of fire to paper and leaves, combines with crushed cloves and mint. A numbing on the tongue as I draw in green eyes that readjust my azimuth, my altitude, with respect to stars he spins me around sidereal nights. I dilate; come tripping toward him on my spring shoes, oscillating wildly. He is a chaotic masterpiece, goes Cubist under my touch-- cold, sharp, rigid corners. He appears particle for my first test then spreads over space, wave-like, diffracts upon my bed sheets, amorphous being. We come together in patterns that construct and cancel, dark and light fringes, my pale peripheral lover, dark hair--thick, viscous. He finds me on dark streets, tiny catacombs off Bourbon where the smell of the river is a flux of dead scents. Alone, he tilts me back, adjusting my spindles, and I focus, as he drinks, to the pole star of which our world spins on axis, I feel the slight wobble, the shifting of magnetic poles. Red electric runs through his dark circuitry. I lose him to the night sea again. He boards the lost at sea ancient constellation, Argo Navis, colossal sky-ship, deconstructed by time. Her shipwrecked pieces scattered in two celestial hemispheres. Red sails become full again, buoyant on my fresh blood, I see his feet lift from earth, the red sail billowing, he vanishes within night mists again. |
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Here the seasons stumble upon themselves in the trees like eleven-year-old girls, with thinning chlorophyll limbs, linear and clumsy, moving forward, teetering back. Knees, scuffed and bruised, dance among September leaves, lift them to the verge of bleeding. |
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My sister walked in steel-toed boots, wore webs under her eyes, grew green mossy nails to scratch the tiny insect bites ringing her birdy ankles. She travels through trap doors now hiding her motions, slip of the wrist, needle to arm, smoke to lips, dust to face... a high school Houdini she is, slipping through administrator fingers, appearing long enough to coalesce in their eyes briefly and forgotten. She pulls her pick lock set from her mouth, where secret pockets store tiny wrenches and twisting metal probes to silently listen for mother's gears to humm the combination and spring open, and her lies slide like viscous fluid from an inclined little sister tongue. The bites rise up her arms, invade her head like silent tumors growing inhalants bursting foreign gas to her brain she falls through the last spiraling trap door into darkness without arms or feet to feel the tingle of air rushing past. |
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Hush! Cup a hand to your ear. Listen to the cosmic cooling-- Bang of the universe now whispering in microwave coos, faint signals through the birth canal of space. |
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He will make more money. Churning out algorithmic Labyrinths that calculate the age this country receives its last welfare check. His body will retain a lean muscular build, devoid of animal fats, milk and eggs. Your belly and hips will grow ten dimensions stretch and roll. Algebraic curves to pack into old vintage dresses you will pick out for 50 cents. It will be all you have. You will dress in-style for nickels, with a face so pale-perfect, you will spend hours picking it apart just to glue it back together with rubber cement that won't dry out invisible. You will put on ethereal music and dance, your face-pieces looking antiqued and chipped. I will love the way you theorize the taste of velvet. |
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To describe myself I say, "Blue violet spider webs under my skin coming up through day-by -day varicose netting." (to catch the man fly) "My lips, they are red" (show no signs of the large bites I take, of the poisons I inject.) |
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Louisiana bayou light scatters off wet leaves branches hang low in water. We rest our oars under swamp canopies a tiny row boat, paddled toward romantic escapes. Over your face veils of blue-green moss, tendrils sway in arcs. To hypnotize with kaleidoscope suns. Your tongue silver as sleek crocodiles, cutting around this vessel. Bauble eyes like flint glare toward the Darwin blueprints of our thumbs. A slither of bronze shadow cast upon your nose illuminates ancient curves, your armor joints scales. Your reptilian profile seeps back my beliefs in Creole voodoo, running rivers in my palms. |
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I often wonder if I were a star, would I go supernova? splatter my woman insides with a catastrophic explosion, make this man universe a bit more feminine. You've probably spent most of your star life concerning yourself with lighter elements, forgotten to live, but planned to someday. You will not go cataclysmically, supernova, but spin off the main sequence lifeline quietly. I grew up and out, sideways. You somehow escaped the hip raider, girth monster, the enlargement of circumference most stars get in old age. I am a fat red giant, still burning my nuclear fuel, hydrogen fusion machine. My hair-beams, a solar wind of photons, giving light for earth's industrial, computer-aged photosynthesis, giving sky gazers something to talk about at star parties. I wink my star eyes, red bulbs, and they call me a variable; it's really undecidedness riding waveform, spherical harmonics oscillations of child bearing between my legs. A stuffy looking astronomer will tell you all life comes from star dust, that stars are the pregnant women of the universe, producing the heavy elements, but what's creating the racism, death, sexism,
hunger? The astronomer will tell you the very carbon you are made of is the remnants of supernova explosions. Don't believe him. He is telling you the truth, of course, but it's not for you to speculate or come to your own star theories, is it? I'm shedding layers of plasma shells, going toward white dwarf stage now, going towards the all iron insides, all iron core. The universe has iron insides, compressed tightly, innards with the density of infinity. We say that they are the reasons for war. We say they are the ones carrying around sexism, racism, classism. We say they will rob you blind. We say watch out for them. We need to accept the equation "They" equals us. Are we not all made of star dust? |
All of the above poems are © copyright Claudine Moreau 2000. They may not be copied or reproduced in part or in total without prior permission of the author.
I received a master of science in physics in August 1998 and now work in Washington, DC on contract with NASA microgravity research. I've been writing poetry and fiction since I was twelve when I bought an old typewriter at a fleamarket. I've had poetry most recently published in the fall issue of The Bitter Oleander magazine. I'd like to head into an age where science and art are not two separate worlds - another renaissance would be nice where the artist and scientist are the same woman. In the meantime, I hope to continue to stargaze, rollerblade, spelunk, and listen to 80's British music. Contact Claudine Moreau gyrlafraid@yahoo.comVisit Claudine's web site of poetry and fiction:
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