You'll enjoy this second of our concurrent August/September issues. We begin with something a little out of the ordinary; not exactly a story, not exactly poetry, but more of a meditation on death that fits right into the horror fiction genre that you will occasionally find in Ibn Qirtaiba. Next Fred Noweck returns from the wilderness to greet us with another of his inimitably-styled Sci-Fi Corner review columns. The conclusion of our continuing serial Land of the Ancestors is next, and more stills from the filmed version of that story illustrate this issue. Finally, Steven Paling who recently contributed the excellent Upgrades for issue 59, turns his hand to poetry with Ordinary Solar System.
IQ is looking for a co-editor. As indicated in issue 60's editorial, its editor since issue 1 has recently taken up self-employment in consultancy. As most entrepreneurs will attest, self-employment can be a bit of a drain on one's time! This is one reason why I would be delighted if one of Ibn Qirtaiba's readers would like to make a name for themselves in on-line SF publishing by accepting the mantle of co-editor. Another reason is that I think IQ could benefit from a new face behind the editor's desk. I have some very interesting ideas to share with the person who takes up this role, which I am sure they will have a great deal of fun implementing. If you are interested in taking up this position, please let me know.
Short story: And Death Shall Have No Dominion by
Sergei Evstifeev
"And death shall have no dominion...
...Faith in their hands shall snap in two"
Dylan Thomas
Sometimes we all have to die. Sometimes we must say goodbye to ourselves, and move to a new soul, deserting the old as the dying rays of the sun forsake the dim earth. Sometimes, we all have to leave.
Why not? It's not as if mired in this inane, absurd existence any of us have found a way to transcend the mundane paradox of life. Caged in this metaphysical quagmire of being we can either pick ourselves up, or drop way down below. Sometimes, dropping makes more sense.
Always, it is the easier thing to do.
I myself can attest to the art of creative suicide. It is a way of life for me. Paradoxically it is a way of death, too. Metempsychosis, the ancient Greeks called it; transmigration of the soul. A mass of teeming memories; ten thousand years in a river of fire, rebirth, streams of forgetfulness, waters of immemorial Lethe. Then I remember. Then I fall. Then I die.
Death is the cleanser; tainted with the secular scum of this world, only through death can we purify ourselves in the fiery aether. There is no will strong enough, no passion fervent enough to resist the pull of death, if you need to go. Dying we will be made whole again.
After all, do we not subsist only on shadows, pale reflections of the true divine order? Death transforms us, freeing our eyes from the pallid simulacra of worldly things. Unchained from the constraints of our bodily dungeon, we gaze at eternity, if only for an instant. Like some watcher of the skies I strive to perceive that which is closed to me, vainly seeking the answers without myself, as silent as that peak in Darien.
I bleed when I write. If you prick me, do I not bleed? My thoughts hemorrhage from my mind as I wring emotions from my soul the way blood flows from a fl(r?)esh wound. I bleed when I write. I die as I speak to you now. Eternal fire. Constant flux. Dynamic and interminable at once, the paradigm of the unity of opposites. Herein lies the most fundamental of all paradoxes of existence, the dichotomy between change and stasis. Ceaselessly changing within predetermined and ageless limits, striving to gain knowledge of the irreducible element of all things; the fire divine. And yet, and yet, if the world be in such a state of permanent flux, then surely no fixed reality exists which can be known by us? Does the ineluctable modality of the visible escape us so completely?
Ashes to ashes... dust to dust. Diaphanous flames shimmer in the desert of night as the Phoenix rises from his egg of myrrh. Immortality <-> Rebirth. The Wheel of Life turns once more. The Phoenix. Perpetual bird of millennia, reaching for the city of the Sun, Eternal City, Heavenly Jerusalem, to consummate life in Ra's altar. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
Fear of death? Death is the only certainty, the one thing about life that is absolutely guaranteed. And yet we cannot live, if we do not die. Another paradox? Life as we know it, is just another death we have lived. Now we move on to the next level of being.
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It has been a while since I posted any reviews to Ibn Qirtaiba. I have been going through a divorce and have not had access to my computer (relying on the kindness of strangers).
I don't have many book reviews to share with you this month but perhaps I can interest you in some movies....
I just saw The X-Men: The Movie. If you haven't read any of the comic books, it can be a little confusing. Otherwise, it is a faithful rendering of the comics. I had planned to attend with the local Sci-fi club in costume as a character in the movie but an impending Court appearance precluded my attending as Professor Xavier... I would have had to shave my head and Judges do not appreciate things like that....
With the success of X-Men, the studios are pushing into production X-Men 2. Also, there are plans in the works to make: Spiderman, Hulk, Blade 2, and Ghost Rider. In case you are not familiar with Ghost Rider, the premise is : a motorcycle stunt rider makes a deal with the Devil (I forget why) and as a result, when night falls, his flesh becomes transparent revealing his skeleton glowing with Hellfire dressed in motorcycle leathers... the special effects should be spectacular....
Star Wars: Episode 2 is currently filming in Australia. Look for it in the theaters in about 2 years....
BTW, Random Jottings is from the old Mushroom Planet series by Cameron.
I just finished one by Robert Frezza titled The VMR Theory. VMR stands for Vampire Master Race. Seems an alien race has determined that Humans are too stupid as a race to survive and that their survival can only be due to a hidden Master Race guiding Human destiny from the wings so to speak. And since at the time of the story, there are a few vampires running around (it seems that there is a rare disease that causes those symptoms). Enter our Hero, Ken MacKay, a victim of McLendon's Syndrome (otherwise known as Vampirism). The aliens are sure that he is one of the hidden Rulers of Mankind. Oy Vey! I now have to read the other books by Frezza. I hate it when they do that to me!
I just started one titled Wyrm by Mark Fabi. It brings together AI's, computor viruses, electronic evolution, and who knows what else... updates on this one later.
Until further notice, I can be reached at katz11@jesup.net.
See ya!
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With no time to react, Pere-Sephon had found herself back at the helm of her spaceship, the Agamemnon, thousands of miles away from the Little Prince of Io, and the fireworld he lived on.
She had arrived in the direct gravitational vicinity of the planet Jupiter. It had hung in front of her, it's massive gravity wake already clutching her ship. Tidal flux belts bathed the hull of the Agamennon, sending warning sensors into a frenzy, while radiation channels ripped through the audio signals of her ship's instruments. The super-intelligence transwave chirped into Pere-Sephon's ear, and it let her know what exactly was the current state of affairs in this area.
But
she did not need the transwave to say anything. She could already see the
tell-tale clues of a confusing web of intrigue that had revolved around Jupiter,
and enveloped all of the Galilean satellites.
Pere-Sephone explained in her own voice what she had seen that day.
"Before my eyes, I watched as Jupiter became the very 'king of the planets..."
"Far above the scorching temperatures and crushing atmospheric pressures encountered in the core of Jupiter, a great city floated in the hydrogen Mindlebrot storms, This city far exceeded the greatest engineering of all the great metropolises in the history of human civilization. This giant floating city was called 'Zeus', the high altitude home and base to the new intra-solar rulers of the Solar System..."
"They ruled Jupiter by 'air-power'..."
"These new rulers were the Medicean Spread, a trade/mercantile union of the greatest fleets of spaceships in the Solar System. They had once been the fraternal organization of the Calculabraic Order of the Golden Dawn, the mathematical knighthood of outer space who had come from the African nations that had participated in the Great Partition. Apparently, they had profited immensely from this decision, and their saga of successful ascension, before my eyes, had begun. I saw first-hand their victory of ruling every trade route, and every port of call between the worlds of the Solar System that needed precious resources to survive"
"Their victory rested that day at the Battle of 1979 J-2"
"Around Jupiter great destruction had occurred. Titanium ion-charge hulls of Medicean attack-fleet-liners had hummed the Jovian plane into an assortment of kill vectors on Saturnilian Wu Dragoon-Scooners. The Medicean Spread, ancestors of the people from Earth-Africa, had won that day over their rivals, the Halcyon of the Kingfisher, by sending Apollo-class warships and Hera-class command dreadnoughts into victorious battle against the Borneo Ringrider crafts modeled on Zhenghe the Awesome's '42 Light-year Fleet."
"The prize that the Medicean Spread won that day in the last battle of the Knighthood Feuds was the ability to control life on every world in the Solar System, even if they wanted, on the planet Earth, and no more important than any other world."
"The stress to my remembrance on that day was that all of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter had been corralled into the space battle by the Medicean Spread. The Halcyon of the Kingfisher, the knighthood from ringed Saturn, became the enemy of all of Jupiter that day. The political plottings of the Medicean Spread had culminated in the creation of the Notable Corporate Fiefs of Jupiter, made out of the result of the Secret Declension to the worlds of the Galilean satellites. The first trial-battle of the Gran'Notable Navies had all been represented that day for the great victory to drive the influence of the octogenarian Saturnilians out of home-system."
"The ROMAN AIIO supercomputer of Io, the Five Medean Princedoms of Ganymede, the Matriachautte of Europa, and the Mad Duke of Callisto all prospered that day to join the Medicean Spread, lords of the Galilean satellites, rulers of the gravity well of Jupiter space, and proposed inheritor of the temporal in Deep Heaven"
"The Secret Declension had another representative that day, who was not in jovian union. They too had no objection to Medicean military control. They owned other 'dark beasts.'"
"On Mars, the red planet in a 2 million year ice age, I was to soon fatally encounter the real masters of solar conflict, builders of an evil imperium..."
Pere-sephone made a point in this part of her story; the point being that she was to her find misfortune, and her own mortality, in the dark plottings that had swelled throughout the Solar System, each wave of it having originated from the red planet of Mars.
"I learned that the God of War was back, and all of us, who escorted the asteroid Ceres to the Earth, encountered their own predestined end."
"I can easily say at first that fate is cruel. But it is other things"
"It will reveal its intentions, if you do, follow that 'cruel fate'"
"You will see your 'End', but you will also see your 'Beginning'"
"What I am talking about all has to do with what I am to tell you next, when I was reunited with my 'other life', my 'other self', my 'other season'"
"How? On Ceres, the largest asteroid in the Solar System, of course, the whole reason for me being in that dangerous place in the first place. Where else was I to meet my fate? Where else was I to finally realize my own Death?"
"Heroes are wise fools, of course, only when they follow their hearts..."
Pere-Sephone arrived at her own predestination for the life she lived in at that oblivion. It was the orbital time junction of her spacecraft's goal of 'two-for-one' obliviated speeds within the existence of 'faster than light' space travel. The Agamennon became a lower frequency to the outer real-time history of the trans-A.U. outer solar system, and came about, full to stern, in blueshift wavelengths of the real-time possibility that was the Asteroid Belt. With her possibilities corrected and influenced, she came to rest in the orbit of the asteroid Ceres. Pere-Sephon recognized the asteroid's eon old physical-history. It was engraved into the carbonaceous gray surface, with meteorite imprints over every square inch of Ceres's 916 kilometer perfect spherical size.
Pere-Sephon had done the Cerebean monks of Pluto-Charon proud. She had arrived at the exact time when the before mentioned Japanese emperor of the Earth would be courting a young American girl from New Orleans to be his wife and empress. 45 years had passed on Earth, while Pere-Sephon had traveled in faster-than-light speeds of space travel, and time had not seemed to move at all.
Respectively, the history of Ceres did not start with the empress-to-be Lady Kir-sten'ya. It went back to a time when she hadn't even been a few elements on the periodic chart. It went back to a time of a final energy level of absorption, when nothing could be held back no more.
Ceres was essentially the cosmic umbilical to a time when the planetary nebulae and disturbances of gravity upon the medium of outer space had given rise to the creation of our Solar System. It went back to the origins of the birth of the Solar System 5 billion years ago.
Closer to human time, the asteroid Ceres had become human territory in the year
2882, at the time of the Great Partition. The winner had been the Yamato
State of Nippon, also known as Japan, which had actually come out of the bad end
of the Asian-led exodus to build a new human civilization on the Outer Planets.
They had been the only Asian nation to stay on the Earth.
The reason for this was that they had politically backed the creation of the Von Strauven Imperium, and their punishment for abandoning their Asian cousins had been severe. The People's King of the Chin had launching a nuclear strike at Tokyo during the Limited Nuclear Exchange. It had left Japan to be both politically, and morally, crippled.
By the time of the rebuilding of 'immaculate' New Tokyo, the end of the War of the Assassins, and the crowning of Aigu Hirohito as emperor of the Earth, Japan had fully recovered from the '10 minute' nuclear devastation of the Limited Nuclear Exchange.
Japan now ruled the Von Strauven Imperium, if only as symbol figurehead, and some said, the only ritual left from the vanished Commonrealm of Nations that still remained on the Earth.
Now the 80 year old Japanese emperor of the Earth had decided to bring his territorial holding and possession of the asteroid Ceres, allotted to him by the terms of the Great Partition, into orbital adjacency of his kingdom, the planet Earth.
He did this out of love.
To accomplish this, he had to sell his soul to the devil. That devil resided on the red planet of Mars. That devil, the Reformed Gnostics of Ares, rulers of Mars, had the benefit of being able to make sure that the operation of the orbital readjustment of Ceres into the gravity well of the Earth was not disturbed. They had the benefit of the allegiance of their client and minion to the idea of a new rulership of the solar System resting at the feet of the conspirators who had made up the Secret Declension. This was the same Medicean Spread, trade/mercantile empire.
At the wishes of the Reformed Gnostics, the Medicean Spread pushed into the Asteroid Belt, and cleaned out all traces of human colonies. They used the services of pirate spacecraft when needed, and terrorized the trade routes of all the planetoids that made up the Asteroid Belt, adding them to their Medicean trade/mercantile empire.
The Reformed Gnostics of Ares got their desired 'kow-tow' from the emperor of the Earth, he got his asteroid Ceres for his soon-to-be-empress, and the Medicean Spread got an empire of graveyard worlds.
Pere-Sephon traveled at matched fusion velocity with the asteroid Ceres, as the crew of the antiquated Russian space shuttle from the planet Earth used a 'scrapped together' thrillback engine delivery system to drop hydrogen bombs behind the asteroid Ceres. The concussion blasts of these bombs would change the orbit of the asteroid, and would bring it to a new calculated declination of home orbit around the planet Earth.
Pere-Sephon had been reunited with Ceres, enroute to the planet Earth, only to find herself back in Hell. But as she remembered what the Cerebean Monks of her homeworld of Pluto-Charon had said about the asteroid Ceres, and its larger meaning to humanity, Pere-Sephon relaxed in the glow of prophecy.
And her own fate, soon to come.
Reunion.
Pere-Sephone went on to describe what she had seen on Mars, in the brief time she and the Agamennon had circled the entopic elliptic of Mars, where it's gravitational forces surrounded the inactive core of the planet, and burst through the continent-less deserts that were 2 million years old.
"I glimpsed the new axis of power that the Solar System revolved on, Greater Aresia—the 'new' Mars, but only for a slow-time human year..."
"Great changes had taken place in the deserts and glacial fields of Mars. The seeds of life had blown across the dormant fertile crescents of ancient creekbeds and volcanic fissures, and come with the idea of a reawakening the gift of life on a world."
"Greater Aresia had violated the first idea behind the Great Partition, which state; 'We shall adapt to the worlds of the Outer Planets, and not, make them adapt to us'"
"Mars was in the process of becoming the Green Planet. The terraforming process of making the planet more like the Earth had created a vast hectared prosperity sphere. The salmon and crimson skys of Mars changed slowly to a more Earth-like blue and the temperature more like a day on Earth. Some places allowed in their nature a person to stand in the open air of Mars with nothing more than an oxygen mask. Some places, the equatorial canyon region of Mars in particular, a person could stand on a canyon floor, without a protective suit, and without an oxygen mask - to breathe in the new Martian air"
"But I doubted that the rulers of Greater Aresia, the Reformed Gnostics, leaders of the Secret Declension, were able to breathe in any 'air of life' into their lungs:"
"I did not see how anyone could easily breathe in the smell of butchered human flesh."
"I say again as Serpina Pro Lu Hoc Lin, also known as Pere-Sephon in your language, who hails from the primordial ice pastures of Kuiper and Oort, stretching for a parsec eternity that are greater and lesser then the stellar parallax of my planet, Pluto-Charon, - I did not breathe life there on Mars."
The new rulers of Mars, the Reformed Gnostics of Ares, had their origins in a splinter group from the Toltec Nasach of Earth- North America. They had brought with them the worship of the Tarantula, the Tarantel, and the Tarantism, and hitched a ride to the planet Mars on the rocket ingenuity of the survivors of the Seattle Contingency.
The winners of the Secret Declension - these Reformed Gnostics, had created an ultra-baroque society in the southern carbon dioxide polar fields. They lived like succulent, perverted lords, and ruled Mars as 'Ares' from thrones of pontifex maximus, built in triumph to their mastery over the human DNA. Their carved likenesses in flesh were the very Sistine, beatific vision of the 'the unattainable' image of humanity; an androgynous race.
Pontifex maximus hermaphroditus.
Each sapient priest had been made a hermaphrodite, she-male baron of the Trinity of the Tarantula, the Tarantel, the Tarantism, and designated papal legate, to govern a thousand worlds and worldlets in the Solar System.
They flaunted their belief that they were the temporal representatives of the
Universe in the 'many faces of god.' They flaunted their arrogance and made
a totem of war for their self-conviction and faith.
Terraforming became a weapon."
The Asia-astical Clans of Moises, the blending of the culture that had become the Baalist First Martians, and the Pan-Arabic/Asia nations of the Great Partition, stood in the way of the Reformed Gnostics being lords of the planet Mars.
'Never forgive, never forget' was the Baalist war-cry in every colonial hamlet.
In the canyons of the interior regio they defended, and in the northern polar dune fields they had stood their ground, but the Clans of Moises could not stop the laser-sun-slags, emitted by the Gnostic laser canons in space orbit. These weapons of war had superheated the northern polar ice caps into continent-size floods of water and mud.
Almuncantar giants, quasi-angelic gene tailored humans from the solar wind scorched planet Mercury, watched over the decimation of the Asia-astical Clans of Moises by the force of these artificial deluges. What families of the Clans survived the destruction of their homelands, was cowered by the Almuncantar warriors from Mercury into bitter surrender, and servitude to the 'one-face-of-hate.'
The Reformed Gnostics of Ares had built Greater Aresia to conquer Greater East Asia. The arachna-trans-sexualism of Green Mars had violated another idea behind the Great Partition.
'We shall be One with Nature'
The native lifeforms of Mars had become extinct...
Pere-Sephon had no time to react to the attack on her ship, as either did the other spaceships from Uranus that were part of the escorting convoy enroute with the matched fusion-velocity of the asteroid Ceres. While the Ceres convoy had been well-fixed into the orbital declination of the planet Earth, the Reformed Gnostics had ordered an attack upon the Outer Planet Convoy. Their agents of destruction were the dreaded Mastiff raiders from the cloud-veiled, inferno world of Venus. They fired hyperkinetic anti-matter slices into the tachyon field of every ship within the convoy. The Pan-Uranian spaceboats were instantly destroyed.
Only crippled, the Agamennon was made unable to reassemble. She was impaired by demolecularization at the quark particle level.
This was the mortal wound. The ship could not survive. The Agamennon would explode, and Pere-Sephon would have to escape...
That day above the holocaust desolation of the planet that had once been called Mars, survivors of genocide watched the destruction of the Agamennon in outer space above the planet. They watched an escape craft eject from the quark implosion ejecta ring that had once been the spaceship from Pluto-Charon. This was the drop-tug from the destroyed-Agamennon, heading towards the one planet that Pere-Sephon had never been to.
Earth.
Pere-Sephon explained.
"The lotus of the Cerebean monks of my Pluto-Charon home calmed my decision. I trusted them, and knew only of nothingness, as I drifted towards the faint gravity well of the Earth."
"I claim that my own life was saved, even while my mortality was not, by the knowledge I remembered from the tutoring of the Cerebean Monks."
"I heard the Stygian chants to the pastures between the Kuiper and the Oort. I heard the pulsar songs of red and blue, the colors of Deep Heaven. They reminded me that when innocence is lost in the presence of life's beauty, but reminded of death when heaven is fulfilled by reunion. Prophecy itself is entered by the embrace of life's darkest shadows before the first light can accompany death through the changes of the seasons, and renewal."
Cerebean monks had returned in spirit to chant one last time to their messenger, Pere-Sephon.
"Heaven is reunited with hell when the daughter of the seasons is given back to the Mother of the Earth."
"The new season in the sky will mark the reign of the serpent queen and the drawing battle with the demon."
Pere-Sephone eulogized her legacy to the Earth, and the people who were listening to her story from the grave.
"I die knowing I have lived to fulfill prophecy..."
"Life seen through, until deaths entrance, is to see the beginning start to end..."
"What chances will the earth, lowercased and subjugated, take to follow its heart again?"
Where the present time of Pere-Sephon's ghost mingled with the land of the living, and the past time where she had crash landed on the Earth was told once again, Pere-Sephone died once more in a cornfield in 'soviet'-Ohio-USA.
Life would never be the same, after that day, for the army conscript who would become the Monkey Messiah. He left the same day, abandoning all to the unknown.
Pere-Sephon... Serpina Pro Hu Loc Lin... the Astronaut-Who-Fell-Earth, could also have been said to have died for a second time in the mountains of Montana, in a dark room of sleeping monkeys and dosing people, in the great agrarian nation of Communitaria. After the tale of the Astronaut-Who-Fell-To-Earth was over, Pere-Sephon left the spirit of the living, and returned to the land where the dead slept for eternity, where her Asiatic ancestors slumbered on Stygian banks, and she was reunited with lost love.
The Monkey Messiah regained his own soul, mind, and body. He had been the
door between worlds, and that door now, was closed.
The Monkey Messiah looked around the room. He made eye contact with the Last
Sailor, Anacreon Oregenamen, and understood in that second the grief that was
inside of his heart. He next made eye contact with the soldier of the pagani
people, the Engineer named Janus Southcross, and understood the grief inside her
heart as well.
They both ate from the same god.
It would be his task to show them the victory of Pere-Sephone. He explained
the nature of her burial, when he and his army garrison, had buried the
Astronaut and Space Traveler, in the plain view of the Twin Towers of the High
Estates General, in the soviet lands of Amish Ohio. The Astronaut and the Space
Traveler that had come from the edge of our Solar System deserved memorial. She
had told of the incredible epics of life that were going on in Deep Heaven. Her
triumph had been her ability to turn her death into a story of life for the
Earth.
The Monkey Messiah's transmutation was a success.
It had focused on the story of her eventual reunion with fate, in both its cruel realities, and its own unexpected joy. There was reunion in eventual 'death'. This was the nature of Fate. The Monkey Messiah transmuted this message into a message that Anacreon, wise fool and failed hero, could understand.
Pere-Sephone's life was understood as a beginning that had made it home, to a 'Forever,' that could only be understood by the ones who had had their own innocence destroyed, and their own faith in 'Forever' tainted to ever try to dare open the heart again.
Anacreon, the Last Sailor from the seas of the Pacific, had witnessed this same sort of predicament. His own life had ended, and he found it hard to believe anything else could come out of this absence of love.
But he was still alive, and in his old life's death he had seen his
'beginning' in the land of his ancestors.
America.
Anacreon made sense of the tale in this way:
The Monkey Messiah embodied the spirit of the innocent servant, and then, lived out the mischief of the very own gods he helped to create with his free will.
And for Anacreon, to now gaze upon the twisted roots and branches of the great spirit that the Monkey Messiah had grown in his heart, and permitted, to let a life grow there, showed Anacreon only one possibility to why he was still alive.
He was still in the presence of beauty, and he had a story to grow in the soil of his past experiences, whether they be they be the ashes of his past disasters, or not.
That was his life. He wanted to live his story. He understood perfectly well that his heart would break again, but it had to be filled for that to happen.
And his heart was quite empty at the moment.
He would take advantage of the opportunity, and fill his heart again.
He understood this to be the true gift of life, and so, when the Monkey
Messiah looked over at him and asked him 'what he would be, now?' Anacreon
simply said aloud he would simply 'live.'
Live.
Next to the Last Sailor, the young woman pagan Engineer, known as Janus, said a silent prayer underneath her breath that went like 'YaHeh-VaheH.' She was silently pleased. The Kabalistic vision she had had a few days ago about meeting this stranger from the Pacific, had been specific about him when it had said 'his heart was his biggest gift that her own fate would ever meet.'
That was all the vision had said, but it was enough for her.
She was pleased knowing that his heart had taken a step closer to being healed,
for such was the importance of the Last Sailor, that she was relieved to not
know the full plans of Deep Heaven for the time being...
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On Reading that Our Solar System
Is a Very Ordinary One
Just my luck,
to be born in a middle-class solar system
in the suburbs of the Milky Way,
where pink flamingo moons
orbit the front yards of the planets,
and space shuttles carry astronauts
into orbit like commuters
or traveling salesmen. One can imagine them
stepping back off the shuttle
wearing wrinkled suits and conservative
neckties beneath their helmets,
carrying air tanks and overcoats and
meteorites like souvenir paperweights
from business trips to places like
Poughkeepsie, Cleveland, or outer space.