The poet lit one cigarette from another. Who was I to him? I wondered. I liked to think he also saw me as a ghost, a departed Polish poet. I saw no spheres, but I loved the idea of them — the idea that our worldly light could be reflected back to us and mistaken as supernatural. I fantasized that a couple of aluminum boxes were positioned in the distance to facilitate the mysterious radiance.
Some say the glowing spheres near Route 67
are paranormal, others dismiss them as
atmospheric tricks: static, swamp gas, reflections
of headlights and small fires, but why dismiss
what misapprehension can establish, our own
illumination returned to us as alien, as sign?
They’ve built a concrete viewing platform
lit by low red lights which must appear
mysterious when seen from what it overlooks.
Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself
and then gaze back, an important trick because
the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,
shuttling between the you and I.
I thought of Whitman looking across the East River late at night before the construction of the bridge, before the city was electrified, believing he was looking across time, emptying himself out so he could be filled by readers in the future; I took him up on his repeated invitations to correspond, however trivial a correspondent I might be. I imagined the lights I did not see weren’t only the reflections of fires and headlights in the desert but also headlights from Tenth Avenue and the brilliant white magnesium of the children’s sparklers in the community garden of Boerum Hill and a little shower of embers on a fire escape in the East Village, or the gaslights of Brooklyn Heights in 1912 or 1883 or the eyeshine of an animal approaching in the dark, ruby taillights disappearing on the curve of a mountain road in a novel set in Spain. I’d been hard on Whitman during my residency, hard on his impossible dream, but standing there with Creeley after my long day and ridiculous night, looking at the ghost of ghost lights, we made, if not a pact, a kind of peace. Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures. In a few weeks, just before this book began, the poem would end:
I’ve been worse than unfair, although he was
asking for it, is still asking for it, I can hear
him asking for it through me when I speak,
despite myself, to a people that isn’t there,
or think of art as leisure that is work
in houses the undocumented build, repair.
It’s among the greatest poems and fails
because it wants to become real and can
only become prose, founding mistake
of the book from which we’ve been expelled.
And yet: look out from the platform, see
mysterious red lights move across the bridge
in a Brooklyn I may or may not return to,
phenomena no science can explain,
wheeled vehicles rushing through the dark
with their windows down, streaming music.
Permanent installation
FIVE
“The quality of the photographs is implausibly high,” I said, “and there aren’t any stars.”
“The angle and shadows are inconsistent, suggesting the use of artificial light,” she quoted, eyes beginning to shine.
In college, Alex had dated a humorless astrophysics major, now the youngest full professor of something at MIT; after a few months of growing intimacy, she’d felt obliged to introduce us. The three of us met for dinner at a Cambodian restaurant not far from campus where, slamming can after can of Angkor, I insisted the Apollo moon landing had been faked. I was so persistent, he believed I was at least half serious and it drove him insane. Long after it had ceased to be funny, and after Alex had repeatedly tried to change the subject, I was still passionately identifying supposed inconsistencies in the images and astronauts’ reports. (I was familiar with the arguments of disbelievers from a paper I’d written about conspiracy theories for a psychology course.) The scientist couldn’t stand me, was clearly baffled by how Alex could consider me her best friend; she was furious, dodged calls from me for days.
Now we were sitting side by side on a lawn swing in the middle of an expansive, unkempt backyard in New Paltz, and, having indicated the gibbous moon visible in the daytime sky above us, I was again listing the reasons why I “believed” the landing was a hoax. Over the years this had become one of our ritual ways of affirming the priority of our relationship over other modes of coupling — half inside joke, half catechism. My arm was around her, and the cancer had spread to her mother’s spine.
“There appear to be ‘hot spots’ in some photos indicating that a large spotlight was used.”
“You can see the spotlight when Aldrin emerges from the lander.”
“And why would they fake it?” her emaciated mother asked, laughing. Now it was night and we were sitting in the screened-in porch, Alex’s stepfather in the kitchen preparing a bland meal rich in bioflavonoids while the three of us smoked some of the marijuana I’d brought at her mom’s request, her doctor’s off-the-record suggestion. With what I thought of as my advance, I’d purchased from a head shop on Saint Mark’s what Jon described as the “Rolls-Royce of vaporizers”; there would be no carcinogenic particulates to irritate her throat. We passed a small balloon filled with the vapor back and forth between our wicker chairs. The head scarf she wore was gold; the otherwise tasteless vapor had a note of mint.
“Are you kidding, Emma?” I asked with mock incredulity, intensity. “Cold War space race? Kennedy talking about the ‘final frontier’?”
“The ‘final frontier’ is a phrase from Star Trek,” Alex corrected me.
“Whatever,” I said. “The moon landings stop suddenly in 1972. The same year the Soviets develop the capacity to track deep spacecraft. Or to discover we had no spacecraft deep in space.”
“That’s around the end of official military involvement in Vietnam,” Alex’s stepdad said, as he brought in a tray of sliced vegetables and hummus. “Televised landings could have been an attempt to distract Americans from the war.”
“That’s good thinking, Rick,” Emma and Alex both laughing at my mock professorial tone. Rick sat, opened a beer, ate a slice of yellow pepper, then stood up and returned to the kitchen, forgetting the beer; he couldn’t sit still for half a minute. Soon Alex followed him in.
“Not to mention NASA having an interest in securing funding,” I said, but knew the joking was over. Emma chuckled politely in the changed air. I had to fight back my tendency to fill the ensuing silence. A minute or so later:
“So we don’t know how long this is going to take,” she said, and by “this” she meant dying. I swallowed the cliché about none of us knowing how much time we had, and said:
“We’ll be with you. Every step of the way.” She looked at me steadily; I felt thanked.
“It’s not any of my business,” she said after a while, “but I don’t want you two to — how should I put this. I’m a little worried — I’m worried you and Alex might be rushing into all of that because of this,” where “that” meant procreation.
“She’s wanted a kid for a long time,” I said, but thought of my dad’s brief and ill-conceived marriage to Rachel.