Phorbe on Titan(s)

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I was at a bowling alley last week and not bowling because I had come to write—but I had forgotten the first half and outline of the story I was working on. I borrowed a pen from the front-desk guy and "borrowed" a bunch of summer-league applications and sat at the (unopened) bar and wrote two paragraphs before I realized I was going to botch the whole thing. So instead I wrote a bunch of poems over the two or three hours I was there.

This is one. When I wrote it, I knew we'd know if the sub people were rescued or not before it could possibly be published. (We now know they were already unrescuable.)

Thus, in a way, this phorbe was born in the past. And it only becomes more unpublishable as time goes on so I'm posting it here.

At least we haven't placed a man on that moon yet.

Here it is, in its never-to-be-fully-rewritten glory:

 

Phorbe on Titan(s)

 

We don’t yet know
don’t have any idea,
yet, really, what there is to
know about Titan.

Titan the moon with
the inscrutable surface, the
moon with the unknown oceans,
with the chance of life, and

Titan the sub with
the fiberglass hull, the
sub you can only be let out from
with tools only outsiders can bear.

Both Titans may be
Titans holding life,
may reveal great wonders,stories to
be told for ages hence.

Wet, cold depths are
cold, for starters, and
depths are natively mysterious,
are hidden—and hide.

The Titanic itself took
titanic amounts of time and money to find;
itself it buried, which burial
took only hours.

Hours are what they
are allotted in breath, assuming
what happened wasn’t a sudden fiberglass failure—
they happen, you know. Catastrophically.

Makes you wonder if
you, I , we should just stay off Titan’s
wonders, whatever they might be.
If life lives, let it live.

But we must know,
we must get to the ocean’s floor,
must see if skeletons remain,
know whether the hull is solid, twain, shattered.

Oh, Titan! Titan! Titan!
Titan lost,
Titan sought,
Titanic turned to money-making myth.

We want to know.
Want
to
know.

We want to know,
want to remove enough mystery
to make the bardo plain and thus
know our own unknowable passage—now.