TERMINAL VELOCITY
They would ask, should I return,
to give them names for all the things I saw.
Even as I fed back voltage, trickled chemistry
past electrodes; even as I shared my heartbeat
with their monitors, my blood across
their microscopes, they would question
in quiet voices, seeking out new nouns
with which to corner the ineffable,
new verbs to charge the immaterial.
Even as now their aerial voices – filtered
through ionosphere, the shingle-clouds
of asteroids, across these tideless oceans -
whisper insubstantial, needle-thin,
scratching their need to know
the unknowable onto the mighty silence.
I trail interrogation like a shower of sparks.
But from this eminence I no longer heed
the eyes that scrutinize, lidless, unswerving.
This dark accommodates a billion eyes,
speculating my parabola by day, by night,
probing for my tiny skidding light.
Implacable, incurious, I navigate
the brilliant wastes - long black sargassos
drifting, planet wrack and flotsam, dereliction.
And beyond, the bright flying splinters of the stars.
pic: http://www.cfas.org/NASA_Space_Place/dsn_70m_40th.html