How to Walk in Space: Untethering
by Joel Peckham
A good man’s life is never quite ended.
—Ed White, American Astronaut
1.
At your bedside, as you came awake, I found myself
looking down and away. You mumbled something. My sister said, yeah we know dad, you’re ok.
You’re OK. As if she knew the language of the dying well enough to translate. Though
I couldn’t make anything of what you tried to say. As you fell
asleep we spoke of how the nurses would increase the morphine and lorazepam drip by drip
until you’d just drift off and away like a windborne puff of dandelion seed.
And I thought of those first spacewalkers stepping out from the hatch, a gold-plated umbilicus,
providing breath, while keeping the body tied to the ship. Lifeline
and leash at once and all of it circling, tangling, flashing with no up or down to go by but the
blue earth and white of the sun, visors
ablaze.
2.
When you first came here, you wouldn’t stop trying to rise, to pull the IV from your arm. I
thought of your father in his last days, how he’d beg you to just please
take him out of this place
to get ice-cream as I sat in my little chair, lost in the cloud
of my parka, sweating and staring at you both, wanting
you to say Sure, Dad, Yeah. Let’s go.
And still, I imagine us stealing a wheelchair, charging down the hall and out the big glass doors,
into the cold bright winter,
laughing and lifting, carrying him to the car to speed away, down route one to Friendly’s for a
Sundae, nurses shouting and waving
in our wake.
3.
All boats tug at their moorings, kites at their strings, even flags fray, threads unravelling in the
wind
When he had to return to the capsule, Ed White said it was the saddest moment of his life.
And I think of that too, and how
the volunteer who sometimes sat with you when no-one else was there, told us of the many
who seemed to wait until the family was gone to take that last breath and let
go. And that’s how it happened. I want
to believe
4.
you were OK. More enraptured, than afraid. Though I have lived enough to know these
expressions
often share the same face—eyes wide, mouth agape. The boy clings to a rope as it swings
above the mirror of evening, sun and boy
and moon at once reflected in the deep blue surface of the lake. I want
to believe
it wasn’t just about gravity, the silhouette of a body pulled through the vacuum of space,
spinning uncontrollably, but a leap
from the rope’s full height and length, fingers unclasping, a gathering of muscles folding at the
waist into a dive into
the sky, headfirst, a cry of terror
and delight, an act
of grace, that is release, releasing me as the rope goes slack, swings back to my hands,
empty, reaching from the beach. There are so many ties that hold us
here, in place when all the choices seem to lead to the same destination. Life
works that way
sometimes. So does love.
Joel Peckham has published nine collections of poetry and nonfiction, including Bone Music (SFA) and Body Memory (New Rivers), and is co-editor of the anthology Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in American Poetry and Prose. Individual poems and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Sun, and many others.
