One Orbit Off
This star reconnaissance began on the fourth of July, the quick morning soft as a fresh bun, as warm, air floating up the stairs and coming across my bed in the smell of burnt cork or punk as smoky as a compost pile rising upwards from gutter and lawn debris the night had collected, spent rockets askew in gutters throughout town, clutter of half-burnt paper and tail sticks themselves once afire in night sky, signals giving darkness a new dimension of light and sound and the explosion of circular flares too bright to look at, as if the sun had delayed departure for the heart of celebration, as if stars had loosed their final demise amid or against the spatial junk they might encounter in outer reaches, the friction of them in the distance measured as silent as Indians in the past on these fields and paths at flint and rock, even as children younger than I was went secretly about the ways and quiet roads and lawns collecting expended shafts of excitement, rolling them into fisted quivers of their hands, tightly against their noses smelling residues of them, dross and dregs of sky-reaching powder short fires had implanted on their thin shanks as black as night was, so when fully amassed in one child's hand a match was re-applied in secret blaze of celebration began anew for those without money to buy their own pyrotechnics, the blue-red and orange-green flames loosed by this competition exceeding much I might have seen on holiday eve, these young scavengers, young army of excitement seekers like fresh winds adrift on the dawn, younger brother Charlie one of the aimless and directed searchers of ignited celebration goods; marked all the way across a vast lawn, where flags were hanging out all night, by his red hair and fiery eyes, even before the false dawn, his nimble legs in drive gear and nimble fingers at bundled grasp of sticks awaiting new flame; he, young Charlie, who was long ago appointed to the same bedroom as I, the choice between us as the one who would decorate the walls with Neil Armstrong's little dance down time's ladder and across the tempest tide of skies and blur of our black and white television set, this younger brother who dreamed and reached the stilted aerodynamics of lads, who exaggerated his heart and his mind for the unseen, the unknown, that far pit of darkness skies offer to imaginations leaping for the wonder of endless contact, sweet abrasions of the universe and its parts, coming global wanderer, aeronaut and astronaut and star traveler now out of the tight innards of the small bedroom Neil Armstrong carried on his back, the fiery-eyed, dreamy, celestial kid brother now in endless orbit and sending me these late signals from a far turn of the once-dark universe whose reception began in simple ignition beneath his hard fisted hand like a wondrous booster for his tell-tale heart.
Tom Sheehan