Sea of Tranquility
This week in the PEN Poetry Series, guest editor Heather Christle features a poem by Lesley Yalen. About Yalen’s work, Christle writes: “In her magnificent essay, “Why I Write,” Joy Williams posits that “The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.” I find myself circling back again and again to this idea—orbiting it—when reading Lesley Yalen’s ‘Sea of Tranquility.’ Maybe that’s because I am feeling the chill of the moon’s surface, or the chill of history. Maybe it’s the grace with which Yalen directs attention from the moon to its light reflecting on earthly events. And certainly there is something in this poem that knows us, that sees this nation’s faults and families, our pride and paralysis. It’s been forty-five years since the moon landed on us, and today I am happy to share in this poem’s first leap into public air.”
Sea of Tranquility
The need for new imagery and
A near-disaster
In the structure of a neighborhood
Far from the mass gross
Absence of sound.
I was not above feeling “we’ve made it”
As the rocket escaped the nag of gravity
The old neighborhood blackened out
And so invisible from the moon
•
The Earth from the walked-on moon
Like your face as seen from mine
Not even hiding their pride
When the astronaut plants the flag.
No one refrains from repeating the gesture forever.
New York as seen from a plane
Writing its name in the sky.
What once appeared to be litter is revealed
As a series of glacial deposits
Artists have doctored
•
Back on Earth, Earth is ugly
The city falls asleep atop itself
In milkweed drifts
And Bubbie is gone.
They say
A lone gunman got the moon
But was it
The moon we suspected?
We try to donate this moon to
The Indians but they refuse its racist artwork
And grudging life-forms. The third astronaut
Said the moon’s surface was too pliant or firm
Or too low to see landmarks and
Our exact position was not at first known
•
My mother says we never had a milkman
Then who was that guy
That guy who brought something white and glass
And what was that sound
When you told me about slavery
It was glass breaking or change dropping
It was dimes dropping and the servants bowed.
(We never had servants!)
Then who was that guy
Standing at the skirt of an exchange
•
From the moon, can we reshape the tide
For ideal oyster beds and shad?
Fix the scoliotic necks and coves?
The drag on this rocket is like
Anything pulling back
There is resistance
There is inertia to keep us from going
And inertia to keep us going
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