Space Journal: Day Dreams
I
The ribbon of time stretches
as my ship cuts through black space
nearly catches up with light.
Why do we seek
to prove that we are alone
in this dilute soup of darkness?
I close my eyes, return to myself
at age three. Half-way up the cliff,
the silhouette: giant and flower-shaped
herb tree, the untouchable beacon.
White bones scattered in its shadow.
The child I was gazed till her eyes ached,
growing more near-sighted.
Mother, the roof is leaking again.
Yellow water rose to tiny ankles.
The child I was, held in the narrow mouth
of a tear in the tableau of space-time.
I turn over in my bunk, hear the child sing:
The mountain is a slumbering horse
Streams course in its heart-caves
You must make water faucets small
Or else two-faced beauty spirits will
stretch out their heads with cloudy hair
to suck in your life-force
The ribbon of time twists
as my ship tries to shake itself loose
from the tugging of invisible tides:
I power on emergency thrusters.
II
Objects form out of nothingness
make space curve around them.
We curve in this curved space.
I close my eyes, hear the thread-thin
voice of myself at age three:
Mother, I had a dream.
Icicles sparkled, laced
the roof of pitch.
In this dream I fly
over double streams lit by rainbows.
I swirl, I glide,
my hair rain of black willow.
Where is my Father?
Mother turned away.
When we look into space
we are staring at Time’s
blank face, which eats us
digests us
in its expanding sphere.
III
I am a prince in another dream.
On steps of the palace
the maiden sits, a fragile statue,
her eyes speaking to me
of things I do not remember.
I wrap her in my cloak.
The bells ring ceaselessly.
These black bones of Universe
These lonely strings of galaxies
How they glow in hallucination
on the observation screen
Mother, the roof is leaking again.
Mother’s tears streamed down the back
of the child I was, trapped in a dimension
that curled into itself.
Do you believe in reincarnation?
The maiden’s voice thin, violin-like.
Peoples, streets, canals buried
a thousand feet under the garden.
A man with dark blue eyes
says without moving his lips:
remember this dream.
Yun Wang is an associate professor in cosmology at the University of Oklahoma. She has published poems in numerous literary journals (including the Kenyon Review, Green Mountains Review, and many others), a poetry chap book titled The Carp (Bull Thistle Press, 1994), and a poetry book titled The Book of Jade (Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, Story Line Press, 2002). For more information, visit her website at www.nhn.ou.edu/~wang (wang@nhn.ou.edu)