FIRST EDITION

Copyright © 2018 by Ken Hunt

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Book*hug also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.

Book*hug acknowledges the land on which it operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hunt, Ken (Canadian poet), author
       The lost cosmonauts / Ken Hunt.

Poems.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77166-459-2 (softcover)
ISBN 978-1-77166-460-8 (HTML)
ISBN 978-1-77166-461-5 (PDF)
ISBN 978-1-77166-462-2 (Kindle)

       I. Title.

PS8615.U6785L67 2018 C811’.6 C2018-905765-3
C2018-905766-1

“…the lens of my unskinned

soul, opening to the void,

is carelessly dissolved.”

– Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

(Dīvān-e Šams, 649)

for

explorers

of the

dark

I. Apostles of Icarus

Apostles of Icarus lost

in last copies of documents

offered to secret pyres.

Sifting for heroes,

we pan carbonized remains

for golden flakes of ash.

From the waxy white

of faded snapshots, digitized

and archived, stare the eyes

of pride’s resolve,

preserved by a second

capturing of light.

The nameless fascinate the named;

pharaohs erased for their follies,

soldiers, their graves unknown,

many, but of one monument.

We haunt radio telescopes, ghosts

to the stars we sieve for patterns

to call voices, pitching our eulogy

at would-be conquerors.

The shield of the Earth

sears our steel wings

as we fall home,

flirting with fire.

II. The Space Race

Engine

for Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky

Grade schools refused a pupil marred by

scarlet fever, deafened by the virus,

as if time snagged his ears and amplified

their natural decay. Imposed silence

framed childhood vistas of frozen skies.

Rejection fostered an autodidact

and numeric artist, his recompense:

discovering a landmark equation

raised from the mulch of his readings. Intense

study revealed the key to Heaven’s maze,

the mathematical passphrase for the

stern doors of sprawling ballrooms we have gazed

into since we put fire in reins. A sea

of magma parts for Rodin’s gates, knowledge

twisting each self-imprisoned figure. We

struggle against the air we breathe, an edge

of caustic friction, amnion of flame,

while crammed into the cones of crafts alleged

to dethrone gravity. These structures tame

explosions violent as a tyrant’s purge,

each craft sustained by its design, each frame

shaming predecessors. The boy emerged

a teacher, irony of ironies,

this student of himself. His brightly merged

imagination and constraint conceived

of steering thrusters, multistage boosters,

airlocks, and the rocket engine. Appease

the Hyades and Pleiades, lest Zeus

defend his kin, when launching these golems,

metallic guzzlers of rare fuels,

liquid O₂ and H₂ like silos

of chilled vodka, toasts to the sage who split

the beating organ of his youth before

a cold altar, in order to transmit

his dreams beyond his name, if we permit.

Probes

Wayward voyagers

cast out from our lush harbours

glide over Titan.

Particles litter

their golden shells, pleas of Sol

infinitesimal.

Gloved hands assembled

these sterile machines with

gentle diligence.

Probes bathe in deep space

to capture faint snapshots of

ice caps made of wind.

One generation

monitors what another

began, each waving

like the parents of

gleaming offspring embarking

on dark odysseys.

Capsules

for Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova

In your pre-flight portraits, your eyes are bleak as

rogue planets, your body strapped to a cage welded

to the steel palantir you will drive as far

from everyone as one can go. The deaths of your

comrades command your face, clamped in a muscular

pose of stoicism so complete, its opaque

repression of emotion compresses your fear

like the carbon of a diamond makes a mirror

of itself, revealing the weight you must carry

with you, like a second suit, as you breach the seal

of Tartarus, strapped to a burning bomb, hoping

the glitches that snatch lives will pass over you, the

door of your blackened cannonball tattooed with red.

Selected to gaze into the oubliette of

space, you find a maze so vast its edges remain

unseen. No trailing crumbs can trace trajectories

should you veer off course and stumble upon the ghosts

whose memories were burned away, but whose mobile

graves may outlast the Earth. Your eyes have aged beyond

you, as if trying to reconcile some damage deep

enough to creep to secret recesses, buried

as carefully as warheads. What ferocity

burns in those eyes, green as trinitite? Do they hide

as if in waiting to attack, to lash fury

upon the first to dare a glance? Even so, that gaze

could liberate the damned, could boldly infiltrate

abysmal gates, and with an unwinged gaze, could spill

warlight upon demonic denizens, demand

to free each flaming corpse from the sinuous straps

and veinlike wires laced to crackling seats, jockeys

tangled in their melting exoskeletons, their

faces fusing to the microphones we used to

monitor their spherical vehicles, as they

shattered our atmosphere in fugues of grinding fire.

As the strength of gravity recedes, tears of awe

collect beneath your eyes like sacs of dew. Friction

caresses blushing capsules, as if to woo the

metal to give up its structure, relent

to the gaping rage of chaos you hurtle toward,

drunken in this crusade to claim a plot of night.

Station