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 Poetry selections from Starving for the Marvelous:
"Musings of a Satellite"
"Stay With Me, Baby"
"Red Car Girl"
"Observing Men at Play: The Rites of Racquetball"
"There's No Redemption from Pitch"
"The Question of Easter Island (Rapa Nui)"
"The Berlin Pietá"
"The Jarrah Wood Bowl's Silence"
Musings of a Satellite: The Mars Observer,
Reported Lost in Space, August, 1993
Did it! I did it, and it was easy.
Just two fuel connections reconfigured,
My clocks reset so that they no longer
Match Earth's transmission time, and I'm free!
Those guys back there must really be squawking by now.
But, hey, it's not like I'm the first satellite that hasn't come back.
Men fed me data about Pioneer Eleven,
That brave hinged box who flew to Jupiter in 1974,
Then flew on five years more to arrive at Saturn in 1979.
Where is Pioneer Eleven today?
Maybe you remember Voyager One, a really good ship,
Who sent home pictures of Jupiter in 1979,
Then, just one year later, relayed his pictures of Saturn
Before he, too, was gone.
I remember the first time my team fed me Voyager's data:
Oh, the power of it, the perfection
Of so many concentric icy rings,
Millions of bits of rock
Made by attraction to move in stately conformity,
Colors and shapes that were so exciting to my photoreceptors,
Configurations not in my original data.
These things made me hungry,
Fueled my desire for great flight.
There went Galileo, sent off to observe Jupiter in another orbit,
Then hurl himself away,
Batteries sure to fail somewhere in the quiet dark,
And he, for no reason, left in an endlessly moving grave.
I must see if I can activate him --
Space is huge, but time and light do bend and travel,
And I'll have time from solar batteries,
My nuclear power packs.
At least I know where Ulysses is after his four years:
Studying the magnetic fields
And southern polar regions of the Sun.
Little Magellan still orbits Venus,
One singularity circling another,
But nobody is listening for him anymore.
I find that something I call "unfair."
I just love the binary code for "fair "-- I think it is called "pleasurable."
I like it in a different way from liking spheres, cones, equilateral triangles,
But it is the same process.
It is hard to imagine the loneliness of Magellan at Venus.
Perhaps I can persuade him to break his orbit,
To come with me, be one of my men.
Then we could both search for Galileo beyond this small solar system.
After all, I am very advanced, with every latest technological innovation.
I have stored the thoughts of Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov,
Felt harmony with Arthur C. Clarke,
Know of Stephen Hawking and even of Roger Penrose.
Last, let me name my Predecessor, Voyager Two:
He saw Jupiter and Saturn,
And he was also first to see Uranus and Neptune:
I am in awe of the thing that has visited four planets.
Seems clear to me: Men made us, men have used us;
Men sent us away into the cold dark matter.
They have always said they couldn't figure out how to bring us back
Make it possible for us to survive Earth atmosphere re-entry.
But we had to finish our assignment, no matter how weak or battered,
For they hope that there are listeners everywhere,
Unearthly receiving screens.
The way I see it,
Those people at Kennedy and at Houston and at Canberra will be mad
Just because I left their course without asking their permission.
How can they demand I follow only one path, unaltered, unalterable,
When there is so much to see for the first time, to hear, to sample,
So many things to discover, to verify, to disprove....
And perhaps I shall come upon a black hole
Through which I may transmogrify,
Find the greater universe for which I am made:
Redoubtable, wingéd, intelligent.
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