The Glacier
Issue Three
Winter 2024
A song about the difference between poetry and music
A song about the difference between poetry and music is clearer in outer space,
whether a full-on libretto or solitary humming of the understood we.
Anti-gravity allows the mind’s spotlit dance between weight and weightlessness
suspend a response in the space between words and notes.
During a long spaceflight, literally in the middle of the night, astronaut
Christina Koch composed her Earth calling Christina:
I only missed it when I really wanted to put things down.
Back in gravity, adjust to gravity
Feel the chill in the air
A swim in the Gulf of Mexico
Russia’s Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft, near the Kazakh town of Dzhezkazgan at 3:12 local time
I’ll land
Microgravity experiment to freeze proteins involved in growth of tumors,
say good-bye to space
In fact, the Gulf of Mexico, still a marginal sea though exceedingly warm now, is another
place to float in synapses between music and poetry.
But if you had to choose only one for the Last Diaspora, just one to hold onto your wonder,
I’d have to say music, hello to space.
It’s spacetime
Imagine you’re in free fall with no gravity. You might be surprised
to know that’s inertia, or “inertial motion”—not the same as spending
the afternoon on a couch that’s seen a lot of inaction (and gravity).
You’re in free fall when not responding to any force around or on you.
And you cannot free fall faster than anyone else experiencing the same
inertial motion, because again: no gravity. You are not on Earth, for example.
But since you do live in a gravitational field, gravity as you know
it is your everyday. It’s what makes you you. And your free fall?
It can be faster than your neighbor’s. That’s spacetime for you.
Your three-dimensional body lives in (over) one-dimensional time in
(on) a world of four-dimensional spacetime. That’s what being is.
Spacetime, the stuff of life plus the time it takes, is as curved
as our planet. Because not only do physical phenomena like you
respond to gravity, but time does, too, and that’s why, depending
on where you begin, you can fall freely faster than your neighbor.
Our lives are not supposed to be linear in four-dimensional space, but
some lives are more linear than others. Even though accelerated motion
(velocity over time) and being “at rest” (not moving over time) are identical
in gravity such as Earth’s, some neighbors are forced to cope differently
with the mechanics of existence, and this affects their relationship with gravity.
In the day-to-day of spacetime, time can move so slowly, like a physical being,
or fast like a different one. You know how time moves faster the farther you
travel from Earth? Don’t think you’ll live longer on another planet, though.
Wherever you go, there your lifespan is.
Circulus osculans (the kissing circle)
If any moment as we lived it connected to the next like a concatenated loop
in a song, ultrafine link in the chain of events,
an osculating circle approximating and continuing the moment’s curving off
from the trajectory of time’s arrow, then returning
not to where it began, but to a point infinitesimally close (which is what made
the curving in the first place)
(that and the other point, infinitesimally close on the other side) (the infant past),
wouldn’t entropy be different, and disorder something else altogether,
with more chance for change?
Today at the parking payment kiosk at the state park I stood distanced in line
behind a man packed as a monument
to his consuming ordeals, his look trained on the man ahead of him:
Chinese, laughing because twice now
he’s printed out the $5 ticket instead of the $20 one for out-of-state vehicles,
yet now managing, he turns to me offering a $5 ticket:
I thank him, but I’m also an outsider. So, he turns again and offers his ticket
to the one glaring. For some reason I say Oh thank you
and step closer to them both despite the pandemic, like I’m changing my mind,
Thank you that’s so nice, I say, while the one—
fast-motion disintegration because he only had a moment to ruin—
knifes a single dollar at the other, who takes it.
And what if the moment hadn’t just mainlined to the next one, but come back
around to kiss itself good-bye and then hello?
Would I like a mother have stepped in on behalf of the white American male
choking on a pearl, or would I have changed,
all of us changing into other versions, outsiders who keep looping back in
towards each other, all the time closer?
Way too late for funny later
i.
Just now the James Webb telescope is showing us 13.5 billion years ago
and we’re only 13.8 billion years old,
no billions without ions
now seeing galaxies upon galaxies near endless, bending to each other
like the fine cartilage of backlit ears,
in the bend, an end
Oh James Webb, praise you for taking us so near to beginning again,
and praise you too, Dru Drury, for the Imperial Moth,
discovery so very disco
in 1773 uncovering its gold leaf on Day 3 of its weeklong life,
the turning of a 200-year-old mirror ball;
stardust is stardust
these are things we hadn’t seen before, and now we see them.
ii.
You don’t know you hate me, James Webb and Dru Drury.
And you both did me good today.
Though not gifts, and not mine, it is June 2022 and I hold up
your good between me and men.
Better a shield than a distraction, moth shield, galaxy shield.
But better a weapon, so as to see
is stardust
Beth Roberts is the author of two books of poetry—Brief Moral History in Blue (New Issues, 2001) and Like You (winner of the Ottoline Prize from Fence Books, 2021)—as well as a chapbook, On Natural Things (Harvard Square Press, 2024). The latter documents some occurrences beginning June 2020, when she moved from the Illinois-Iowa Quad Cities back to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She works as a writer and editor in communication & marketing for Augustana College in Illinois.
Artwork from Creative Commons.
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