The Astronomer’s Complaint, and: The Ambassador

Abstract

The Astronomer’s Complaint, and: The Ambassador Kevin Prufer (bio) The Astronomer’s Complaint Where did you go, pinhole, snowdrop, spark at the point of a lit cigarette? Drop at the tip of a fresh syringe? What hot wires tugged you downward, where snowbanks glow grayly in America’s ashlight? I lifted a colander up to the sky so light came through. I threw handfuls of dimes in the air– I couldn’t remake you, (I sometimes walk through town on a rainy night and think I see you in the streetlights’ reflection from the all-repressing water.) you whose glow was a tear in my telescope’s lens, was a sting in my eye where the lightdrops fell. [End Page 36] The Ambassador I came to that place where the road split and I saw it was a settlement, so I told the natives: Citizens, I have brought you marvelous things and I come from far away and ask just this of you —until an arrow struck me in the chest and down I fell into a wheelrut. They stole my coins and made of them a necklace. They took my shoes and wore them wrongly. I slept in a tangle of roots, felt snow cap that bit of skull that, open to the weather, chilled and ached my quiet head (Our capitol was warmer, and far too far away, and when I closed my eye I could recall it draped across the hills like sleepy women.) Rootwork, loam, a trill of woodbugs undid my arms and back, and now and then the rattle of a clumsy native wagon passed me by and never stopped. My shoulders popped and came unsocketed, and still the thought of lights [End Page 37] along the avenues was a comfort in the seasons, even as increasing traffic leveled the road beside me. And thus I sank and faded deeper into dirt, where no one stole my shinbone and cut from it a comb, where no one saw my glass eye and thought it was a jewel. In darkness, the mind is a nimbler thing, and strange. From the noise of wheels and footsteps, I made up stories: A war and then my city lost in a fire. A crying nymph—for years I heard her in the whirr of spinning tires— as up her cotton nightgown flames like curious fingers crept. The thud of engines and the cries of dying, dark-skinned men— all are fancy and, as such, are voids. I am a worthless, unproductive thing, far beneath the weeds: jawbone split by roots, a useless finger bone, while natives turn the earth above and, once or twice, a piece of me turns with it, rising to catch the air, then down again into the soil. [End Page 38] Kevin Prufer Kevin Prufer is the author of Fallen from a Chariot (Carnegie Mellon) and National Anthem (Four Way Books). He is also the coeditor of New European Poets (Graywolf) and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. Copyright © 2007 University of Nebraska Press