The walls of this space
are paper-crane vertexed,
so high that the exosphere ghosts out,
ghoulish by the time it sees the ceiling.
I am a speck!
a lil thing,
circle-eyed and six,
with plush penguin squeezed in clunky hand
like the tether would be if it were me
on a spacewalk and me
in the high-and-bigness of the hadal zone.
He (my penguin)
looks just like Discovery—
she, the magnet heart
in the chest of Udvar Hazy,
she, the aluminum proof
that they’ve been looking for.
She is sleek and supermassive,
and I have never seen a bird this big.
Discovery slid here on her belly
from the icy plains of Texas
(And before that, of course, from outer space).
Her flippers could flatten a city
and she eats six
trillion pounds of molecular matter
every time I blink.
How could there ever be enough krill for you?
Discovery is swallowing stars and dust.
I, speckling, shiver
in her frost,
from her noble hunger,
and for the eldritch comfort
that her eyes are too large to ever see me.
Her thoughts, though dewinged,
are not confined to this origami hangar.
If you could look through the Earth as she does,
you would see her beak
scuffed with spacedust,
patched and paneled,
yet still pointed at the sky.
