“Ad Astra” by Richard-Yves Sitoski
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Ad Astra” by Richard-Yves Sitoski.
Ad Astra
By Richard-Yves Sitoski
It’s sweltering, an August noon of fishwife squirrels and a weed-whacking buzz that causes houses to
cover their ears. The boy ignores me loudly, tongue of concentration vital to the work of orbiter
assembly. It’s a practise old as travel. Before there were boxes to Sharpie into cockpits, there were
steamer trunk Panzers in desert camouflage and linen chest chariots in the thick of Roman battle. It
seems that Rockwell is equipping space shuttles with snow cone dispensers and thumbs-up posters
Because space can be very stressful! The marker squeaks. Dials and rheostats appear, ways to monitor
some 7 million pounds of thrust. Droplets of saliva sputter as he makes a blast-off noise and rides
controlled explosions, arcing east like a breeze-blown stalk of timothy. My coffee cools while I look for
him, 200 miles above, a mote among the stars, streaking through the aether at 28,000 klicks. It’s ninety
minutes from dawn to dawn and he doesn’t know that time is slow down here, has all but stopped. He
doesn’t know each day I spend an hour at the mirror trying on my smiles, hoping to pin them to my lips
but the pegs and holes do not align. He doesn’t know that I must flag a tow to reach the pad. But he’s
good. He’s got this. He can see the whole blue world from where he is, hurtling happily through the black
with not a care in his gentle bones whether some day he’ll meet me there. And as for landing, he’s got
runways across the globe while I have a bed to crater like a crashing Sputnik. Look how gracefully he
glides to his ground crew and his press corps, as earthbound I await, wondering if I’ll see him before
Detroit gets serious about its promised flying cars.
Copyright © Richard-Yves Sitoski
Richard-Yves Sitoski lives in Owen Sound on the lands of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (treaty territory 45 ½). He was the 2019-2023 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound. His work has appeared throughout Canada, including in The Antigonish Review, Arc, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Train, and CAROUSEL. His most recent works are the chapbook How to Be Human and the full-length collection Wait, What?. His collection A Current Through the Flesh is forthcoming from Ronsdale Press.
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