A Pretty Sight by David O'Meara

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 across my ear. I spot
    the stereo glow, on all morning, the cd
    at rest since its final track, just empty signal now,
    an electromagnetic aria of frequency backed
    by the wall clock’s whirr, the dryer droning in the basement,
    wind, a lawn mower, the rev and hum of rush hour
    pushing down the parkway. I hit the panel’s power button,
    pull the plug on clock and fridge, throw some switches,
    trip the main breaker, position fluorescent cones to stop traffic.
    Still that singing at the edge of things.
    I slash overhead power lines, bleed the radiator dry,
    lower flags, strangle the cat
    so nothing buzzes, knocks, snaps or