Credit & Copyright: Juan Carlos Casado
Brian Turner
Satellites
The universe, she’s wounded
But she’s still got infinity ahead of her
She’s still got you and me—Gregory Alan Isakov
W
hen I was a boy, I used to sleep out on the grass during summer nights like these. I could hear coyotes calling out to one another in the cattle rangeland a couple miles away, and their tenor voices seemed to acknowledge something desolate and cold about the field of stars above. The night’s last stars would soon dim in a powder-blue sky, but for the moment, the cosmos remained still and deep—a midnight blue fading into the void.
California. I’d lay my head back and try to soften my focus until the gel-like panorama spread before me with no particular star or constellation drawing me in. Now and then the glint of a satellite emerging out of Earth’s shadow flared in reflection, and I’d track its orbit through the sky for as long as it remained visible to the naked eye.
To this day, I find it difficult to comprehend the magnitude of such wonder, though it’s stayed with me. This is where I contemplated nearly every profound variation of the questions Why? and How? that have lingered in human consciousness from the beginning of our existence as a species. Of course, they linger still.
The first satellite launched into low Earth orbit, Sputnik 1, lasted just under three months and travelled over 43 million miles before plunging to Earth. But Vangaurd 1, launched in 1958, still circles us each night and day. It’s a drifting piece of archaeology now, which I sometimes imagine burning in an earthward trajectory, the pull of gravity finally bringing it down.
When I stretched my body out in the curling leaves of grass, my eyes to the stars, I’d occasionally catch the firework of a meteor in its descent. And while no organized religion has ever spoken to my soul, something about those quiet nights with the stars stays with me. It’s all so synaptic, fleeting, and strange. Each fiery train of light. Each afterimage burning within.All the dead stars and ancient rivers of light that have traveled across the expanse of time.
Denab. Vega. Kochab.Altair.
Rigel.Antares.Sirius.Capella.
They whisper to us of silence. They remind us of those we love.
Each of us, in the departure, alone.Such brief thoughts written across the sky.
***
Hair
Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d
forgotten.—Robin Wall Kimmerer
We both assumed that I would die first. It was something we took as a given, like facing west to watch the sun go down. But even so, you encouraged me to prolong the inevitable, to take better care of myself, often kissing me as we washed dishes at the kitchen sink, saying I want another thirty or forty years with you, okay?
I thought about this as I stood in the shower this morning and stared at your bottles of shampoo and conditioner, which continue to rest on the bamboo bench, right where you left them. Jets of water thrummed my back. Steam rose to fog the skylight. I was reminded of the first shower we ever took together. That night in New York. The way you tilted your head back and closed your eyes as your fingers sluiced water in channels and rivulets through your hair, the water accentuating your hair in deep brunette tones. I stood there, mute, stunned with wonder.
I sometimes find strands of your hair around the house, even now, years later. At the back of a drawer. In folders. In books. Those of us with brown hair have over 100,000 hair follicles on our scalps, and we normally shed about 50 to 100 individual hairs each day. Each one of yours that I discover takes me out of the moment and roots me to the spot—an unexpected gift, a gesture to the living presence of you in this world.
And there’s so much history stored in each strand, though I don’t fully comprehend how any of it works. Our follicles are sunk like miniature cauldrons into the subdermal layer of our skin, with nerves attached so that we might feel a faint breeze through an opened window, or a lover’s breath on our skin. This much I know. A steady influx of blood brings carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur—the elements needed to form cells, to propagate the helical protein known as keratin. That keratin spirals on itself to create ever more complex structures. Think: protofilaments, intermediate filaments, macrofilaments. These, in turn, form the medulla, cortex, and cuticle. This three-part structure hardens into what we recognize as a strand of hair as it emerges from the dermal papilla, that cauldron whose alchemy still mystifies me when I consider the complexity of it—with each shaft of hair oiled by a sebaceous gland before it rises from the skin, shiny and new.
Of all the ingredients needed, I’ve never connected sulfur with human hair. And yet, it’s a ubiquitous substance in the world, one that cycles on a planetary scale, given a transport of atmospheric and oceanic movement, the dust and powder of it finding its way into flora and fauna alike, into our very diet, the food laid out on the table, in vegetables, meat, fruits, dairy, grain. Only about 5% of sulfur is needed to create hair, but as I hold one of the last strands of yours in my palm, I realize that you were made of mountains. And those mountains unspooled from within you, smooth and shimmering. The earth had to be weathered into a fine dust for this to happen, for the brimming stone to be lifted on the wind or carried by water, eventually transformed within you so that it might bring structural integrity to the keratin in your hair, so that the mountains might pour out of your head in slim strands given a coppery sheen.
When I think of your hair, I think of the two of us leaning in to kiss one another—the many tips of your hair brushing my skin with such delicate nuance that each tiny nerve sparked to the touch, signaling the endorphins to come. I think of jasmine and orange blossom, vetiver and rose. Each breath a redolent perfume.
I’m transported by it. I’m lifted by memory and set down in another year. The buildings will burn and the streets will be filled with a necessary shouting in a future that hums around my head and then fades outward like waves washing out from a stone that water has pulled into itself.
We’re in the shower together, and it’s New York again, your hair a small river in your palms as you guide shampoo and conditioner and water in a downward motion, your face lifted toward the stars that continue to shine over us for as long as they possibly can. I cup your cheeks in my palms, so cool and wet and shining, and when you open your eyes—a subtle shift occurs in the universe. The air resonates with the crackling vibrancy of it.
There’s no other way to say it: You’ve returned from the kingdom of the dead. Or maybe I’m the one who has returned to the world of the living. Either way, we stand together in the landscape of time, with a cascade of water pouring over us.
And any moment now, finally—we will kiss. And the world will be made new.
******
Notes The visual of Sirius by Juan Carlos Casado Is courtesy: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap000611.html
Brian Turner is a poet, memoirist, and musician from California. He has published two collections of poetry (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise) with Bloodaxe Books (UK) and My Life as a Foreign Country: AMemoir (W.W. Norton). His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vulture, ShortList (UK), among others, and he has appeared on the BBC, NPR, and the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Copper Coin will publish a collection of his work in India (Fall of 2020).
Brian Turner reads his Iraq War poems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aneJ9tczurc
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