The Search for Life on Other Planets
Say source. The image that I think of first
Is not the spring itself. We’re a few feet down
From the moss-hidden fissure dipping empty bottles in
To clear brown water making plans.
We ask each other for the names of living things.
We walk in different friend-groups to the viewpoint
And look at where we came from,
Look at where we stopped and where we ate.
Back on campus in a room without
Windows it’s an eyelash on a slide, it’s hills
And canyons from a tilted plane.
Particles displaced. Are most
Of your images of origin stories?
Are most of them stories of birth?
We were looking in terrariums half full of sand
For signs of life and on our shelf
In the lab’s back room on Saturday night
Found most of the dishes clouded and festooned
With bluish grayish green. Her hands
Are lightly freckled, clumsy
And the soul is where the senses meet
The world and touch each other
Somewhere in the thing called self.
They make an object of their strange reports.
Say source and tell me what you look for next
And does it coincide with center
In your eyes? The soul is where the answer is
To gather and to twist the cap
On endlessness that rushes under anxious rain
Toward a valley she did not grow up in
The clouds disclose and soften, seen unclearly,
Largely loved. Saying center I believe in nothing
Stopped and stable and to source
I add of light that alters, water
Cutting through the soil that the plants that need it hold
In place with pale depending roots,
The thin green thing connecting leaves
On the frond of a yellowing fern.
Its touch is brittle. It is like then unlike breath
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Alex MacConochie teaches neurodivergent students in northwest Connecticut and has published poems in Tar River Poetry, Meridian, Main Street Rag, and elsewhere.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 