Voyager.

EMI wouldn't grant permission to
NASA to use "Here Comes the Sun", by
The Beatles. It would have been one in
A variety of sound documents--
HELLO in an array of languages, and Chucky Berry--a
Muslim call to prayer.

The vessel went into space without it.

But the Sky is magnetic. And so what gets
A yes as it rises will always get a yes.
But--and here's the thing, what gets a no
Eventually gets a yes, too. It must rise Longer.

So when permission was denied, the stars Swelled as the sash of the brooding Peacefulness that, yes, is;
And that, no, cannot yet be imagined.

But yes.

The first
Voyager went as far as the hashmark

Where the sun routinely cracks. Not the
Beatles, lifted up, but some forebear, some  

Beating Mozart took-
From his numb, feline
Fingers, to the windows that shook with the

Earth singing.

The red brook

The bach was unsophisticated,
And pretty small.

Listeners came in ignorant of what it meant in translation, knotted shoelaces at the length of simple expression...

They could distinguish the simplicity of their own slang language

From distant counterpoints--But even then they left the currency exchange math to chance. And the disquietude it produced made them visibly uneasy. The water was free.

One, or maybe a few stripped the cone of the dusty fuzz

One of them got too drunk to stand up straight, saying,"Now, let's fill the slate to Heaven--and cook every dish we know for the Sun King."

The moppet.

(The cats must have lived just fine, separately, while I was gone.)

God's Dad didn't hover because he didn't really care.  But once, he said, what is that.  What is that supposed to be??

The son sat hunched on a piece of graph paper, whose adornment was a Twomblyesque starbuck that were it any other occasion, it could be identified like that, and just that.

CHRYSANTHEMUM.

How's that supposed to work?

The son bunched irritably at the shoulders, as if about to rote recite Latin for an ignorant parent who might know he hadn't studied, but all the same couldn't read Ovid for himself.



The flower, he said, finally, Dendranthema, pictured being led into the western world, by way of Russia, disguised as forlorn moppets, their faces hidden,

Sun in their hair--and eventually a new world.

But the dad just grumbled.  When I first saw one I--and have no other reason but this to remember--caught sight at a roadside stop on the turnpike.  I was pretty young.  Everybody else was eating or helping with the oil change on the long vacation drive.  I went to pick it when it vanished.  And with it everything vanished.

We drove across Dauphin County and I could smell the bracing choir of things.  I was carried into a local hospital where my parents were eventually told it was just an unexplainable accident, which even then seemed flimsy to take science out while resolving the greater innocence.

In the room where I woke up a pastor from a nearby church had heard, and left me a tiny potted cactus as a gift.  And a few comic books slouched in the window sill like an old broom.  One, I remember was a Spiderman. While the other followed a superhero who had no face.  But it wasn't really that he had no face.  It was simply that, in his tact, and plied by his ardor, he made it so that no one could remember him.

The dad said, making a grand connection, Do you remember when you we young--almost too young to remember, I'm afraid, and we sat by the window listening to music. I do.  I remember.  Ernest Chausson's garden of lilacs? Moonglow, the son said, with the picture eventually taking shape beneath his hand.  By Artie Shaw.