Canaveral Seashore National Park
Full moon. Everyone in silhouette
graying just this side of color as we wait:
babies in snuglis, toddlers from whose clutches
ancient blankets depend, adults encumbered
with necklaces of cameras, binoculars.
A city of people gathered on the beach.
Expectant boats jockeying offshore.
When we were kids we used to race
reciting the seething sea ceaseth;
thus the sea sufficeth us
and then collapse with laughter, never
having seen the rise-and-fall of ocean,
the lip of foam like seven-minute icing,
moon-pricked dots of plankton skittering.
The horizon opens, floods with daybreak,
a rosy sunrise as out of sync
as those you fly into crossing the Atlantic,
midnight behind you, the bald sky blank,
and up comes the shuttle, one costly Roman candle,
orange, silent, trailing as its rockets fall
away a complicated snake of vapor.
Along the beach a feeble cheer.
Muffled thumps of blastoff, long after,
roll like funeral drums, precise and grave.
We are the last to leave.
Driving back along the asphalt, signed
every hundred yards “Evacuation Route”
past honeycombs of concrete condominiums
I remember how we wrapped and carried
our children out to a suburban backyard
to see Sputnik cross the North Temperate Zone
at two in the morning, and how we shivered
watching that unwinking little light
move east without apparent cause.
On this warm seacoast tonight
in the false dawn my neckhairs rose.
Danger flew up to uncertain small applause.
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