“Do You Read Me, Houston?"
Aug 1 2009


When his foot touched the surface
we pumped our fists
hugged the nearest body
cheered ecstatically.

His boot, actually.
Which means we haven’t been to the moon,
not really.
Haven’t felt its ancient sand between our toes,
basked in the warmth of earth-light,
made brobdingnagian leaps
unencumbered
by clunky pneumatic suits.
But this
is close enough.

We watched
in grainy black and white.
We listened
to distant voices
crackling through space.
And as the fragile suit dangled stiffly
from the rickety ladder’s bottom rung,
I worried he’d fall
tumble backwards
pierce the fabric,
and who knows what would happen to a human body
in that perfect vacuum.
And I worried he’d step
into soft bottomless silt,
sinking beneath millions of years
of moon dust.

In the end, he mangled the momentous pronouncement.
We heard only “Man”.
He insists on “a man” —
the humble indefinite article,
even if he was the most famous man in the world.
Nixon also had a speech prepared
in case no one returned.
Something like “3 lifeless bodies
forever preserved,
a monument to human yearning.”
And made himself scarce,
afraid of the taint of failure —
typical Nixon, politics first.
Kennedy was already dead;
both of them.
In ’61, he had rallied the nation;
but apparently
didn’t much care for space exploration.
No, we sent men to the moon
to put Russia in its place.
. . . So much for “one large step”.

A flag was left
waving in an ersatz wind.
The whole world may have travelled with them
holding its collective breath;
but they were sturdy patriots, nevertheless.
They brought back rocks,
which seems a long way to go.
But as they say
it’s the journey, not the destination.

But I kept thinking back
to Collins —
stuck in lunar orbit,
so close, and yet so far.
I thought about duty
and self-abnegation
and the luck of the draw.
I knew Armstrong and Aldrin
were cut from different cloth
than me.
I was Collins,
looking down from above
detached,
winning Miss Congeniality
a door prize.

When the lunar lander lifted-off
we felt a surge of pride
— we all owned the accomplishment,
our common humanity.
And forever after
“Houston” will evoke powerful feelings
of safety
and home.

The footprints are still intact
40 years on.
The astronauts are now elderly men;
and I’m older
than they were then.
I gaze at the full moon
on a clear summer night,
walk in its silver shadow,
remember how precious and small
this planet looked,
looking back.
Except there is no one circling above us now;
and Houston is hot
and over-crowded.

We got bored with moon-walks
soon after that.
Some still claim it was staged,
Walter Cronkite notwithstanding.
Or even that the earth is flat.
Which is how it feels, flat —
when we never went back,
40 years on
and counting.



This was written several weeks after the commemoration of the first moon landing. I was at summer camp 40 years ago, and we all gathered around a small black and white TV to watch. We certainly felt the weight of history, as well as a powerful sense of pride (undeserved by us, of course!) in human achievement.

This poem began, believe it or not, as an attempt to write a short story. Of course, it inevitably turned into a poem (what else?!): it seems I'm no good at narrative or character, only sentences. Nevertheless, by my "one page" standards, it's a veritable epic!

I was attracted to the short story because, among other things, I thought it would let me say more, be more expansive and declarative; that I could get some relief from the discipline of cutting, of leaving things unsaid , of the stern dictum of "more is less". But by approaching this as a prose poem -- kind of talking my way through it -- things seemed to work out just as well. In the end, it's a bit of a mongrel -- some prose, some rhythm and rhyme. And it says what it says, no fancy metaphors or multiple meanings. In other words, a pleasure to write!