Orders for Vietnam in the Sea of Tranquility The moment I mean isn't exactly that moment when Armstrong set foot on the moon, although we could say it was sacred, a seized cratering of thought over the lifeless womb of its untouched sand. How could he, or any of us survive its shockwave of silence? I rested with them in the sanctuary of their seven-hour wait, minds entrenched in the tenuous chance of their lifting off, my own hand, white-knuckled, clutching the orders for Vietnam. None of us slept. Instead we imagined the cresting of wildflowers, or the harsh possibility of being lost and the frailty of the orbiter over our heads. Lightning Sometimes the mind swirls (in spite of how much we love, or how much we're loved back) like a cloud filled with colliding hydrometeors. Each touch of affection, each embrace, broken down by the larger negatives: The deep voice of gravity telling us, "We don't deserve [End Page 148] it"; the fear building to millions of poised volts waiting to discharge in the inner ear. And then the flash across all the years of your opposing regions, the predictable "four strikes" (the body, mind, emotion, and soul). Your need for love heated to twenty thousand degrees, the compressing thunderous clap shaking the life you want like a window facing the storm. On the Thirty-Ninth Night I alone choose if I'll sing the Raven's song from this declining body, or if I'll reason at the door of every man's impending death like the prophet exiled to an unfamiliar world (where the ends of thought leave my mouth and float like twists of cloud, a pillar-like exclamation in the desert sky). I am the fragile voyager wading this forty-day river that has wrestled its way past miles of rocky abrasion, miles of erosion bending line after straight line. I alone choose the undisturbed sediment and shale, the impressionless sand, the cypress kneeling on the other side.