Once, the path of rockets
marked the sky like flies
on an August afternoon.
Steel and rivets shook, sockets
creaked with the deep effort
of propulsion.
The faces of onlookers
flushed with the back-fire.
One by one the neighbors
abandoned their houses
to the search
of wind for someone to touch.
Grass poked through
the driveway, brittle and dry.
Restless steel burned from star
to star; the only noise audible
from brown lawns
a calm whirr of liquid
oxygen leaking into the darkness.
On earth, amongst
the foibles of spring snow
and thin winter light
we struggled to remember
the rockets' exact shape,
how the fins streamlined
in a curve that seemed
merely a suggestion.
With binoculars we watched
the lost titans at night,
hoping to glimpse
their burnished bodies
magnified in the lens. To feel
one near--monumental,
the lines precise and clear.
Above us, the occasional
wink of light marked
the inarticulated
dimensions of space and
time, a brief description of flight
against a dream space.
Emptied, exhausted,
they spiral toward earth.
We search for the pieces,
salvage their twisted sculpture,
small enough to lift with our hands:
the metal and bright sky conspire,
and eyes against the light
mirror these scraps,
a god's arrows
rushing to pierce
the iron core of the sun.