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Born To Die

by R. A. VILLANUEVA

…Law will not sanction such abuse
Forever; when the mischief's done,
Planets, rejoice, on which at night
Rains but the twelve-ton meteorite.
 
 — from "Three Sonnets in Tetrameter"
  Edna St. Vincent Millay

1.  
 
In the images and video released by the Sliding Spring Observatory hours after the passing of Asteroid 2009 DD45, the evening sky over Canberra seems thrummed with static. And in these grainy sequences, that rock, bathed in friction and gas, is either a bright speck shivering at the frame’s center or a glimmering mote, arcing gently upwards from the right-hand corner of the film.  
 
Discovered less than a week before footage was shot, 2009 DD45 appeared like a thief in the night, stalking the outer orbits of our geostationary satellites, its perigee 1/5th the distance between the Earth and moon. Which is to say, had our gravity been any more seductive, the asteroid would have breached our atmosphere’s upper heights with a certain and all-consuming fire.


2.
 
By most measures, 2009 DD45 echoes the size, velocity, and attendant heat of a cosmic body—or, as a competing theory goes, an aggregate mass of cometary debris—which broke through morning and exploded over the hinterlands of Siberia in June, 1908. The shock wave of its entry and the subsequent matter-bursts above the Stony Tunguska River released enough thermal and kinetic energy to fell tens of millions of trees and incinerate a range of nearly a thousand square miles.  
 
Near the hypocenter, descriptions of the event sound like incantations. A trader working the riverbank recalls how the “heavens moved apart a great distance” and the “whole northern part of the sky was covered with fire” so that

I got so hot I couldn’t endure it, as if my shirt had burst into flame while still on me, and from out of the north, from where the fire was, there came an intense heat. I wanted to rip off my shirt and throw it away, but at that moment the sky slammed shut, and a mighty crash resounded and I was thrown about [twelve feet] to the ground. For a moment I lost consciousness, but my wife, running out, brought me back into the hut.

In a letter about a week afterwards, the head of a local meteorological outpost boils down eyewitness testimony into a singular account, a fusion of hibakusha narrative, an interchapter from In Our Time, and the Apocalypse of John:

At 7:15 a.m. there appeared in the northwest a fiery column with a diameter of about [twenty-eight feet] in the form of a spear. When the column disappeared, there were heard five strong, abrupt bangs, like from a cannon, following quickly and  distinctly one after another; then there appeared in that place a dense cloud. After about 15 minutes the same sort of bangs were heard again, and after another 15  minutes it repeated as well. The ferryman, a former soldier and in general an experienced and knowledgeable person, counted 14 bangs...The fiery column was  visible to many, but the  bangs were heard by an even larger number of  people…[Peasants from neighboring villages] pass on that there had been a strong  shaking of the ground, such that the [window] glass was broken in the houses.

Among the native Evenks, the roar and bellow inspired fierce cautionary tales: of shamans allied with the god of storms, of thunder-birds with eyes of lightning and bones of molten iron. 

3.  

It is easy to imagine the speaker of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Three Sonnets in Tetrameter” enraptured by the sound and fury at the locus of an asteroid impact. Easier still to imagine the speaker of another constellation of her sonnets, “Epitaph for the Race of Man,” somehow disheartened at 2009 DD 45’s threat and dart, flash and juke—how such celestial near-misses remind us of the inevitable but signify nothing beyond a harmless uptick in the Torino Scale and a soundless ricochet into the dark.
 

Both clusters of verse are relentless in their characterizations of a flailing, clamorous humanity “out of ooze  / But lately crawled.” One opening grieves and proselytizes from afar, throwing out an exasperated “God!—” at the sight of how we “masses mill and swarm / And troop and muster and assail.” Another poem warmly meditates on an Earth divorced from all our march and stammer, imagining an expanse of quiet, a skull tumbling in the Doomsday surf. And though these voices concede that “Man…when his destiny was high / Strode like the sun into the middle sky,” with “his conscience and his art,” the truth and durability of our renascence was quick to pass: at best, we only “shone an hour” before crashing “down into the sea, / Leaving no spark to be remembered by.” When the hit comes, these poems seem to hiss, rest assured that we deserve it, and that the planet will thank the universe for the favor. 

R. A. Villanueva is a writer living in Brooklyn. His digital home is here. He also curates Experiments & Disorders, a reading and performance series dedicated to undefining the boundaries between poetry, fiction, and drama. You are encouraged to attend the first Experiments and Disorders of the fall season tomorrow night, October 1, at 7:30pm. More info here.

Three Sonnets in Tetrameter

by EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

I .
See how these masses mill and swarm
And troop and muster and assail:
God! --- We could keep this planet warm
By friction, if the sun should fail.
Mercury, Saturn, Venus, Mars:
If no prow cuts your arid seas,
Then in your weightless air no wars
Explode with such catastrophes
As rock our planet all but loose
From its frayed mooring to the sun.
Law will not sanction such abuse
Forever; when the mischief's done,
Planets, rejoice, on which at night
Rains but the twelve-ton meteorite.  
 
II.
His stalk the dark delphinium
Unthorned into the tending hand
Releases . . . yet that hour will come . . .
And must, in such a spiny land.
The sikly, powdery mignonette
Before these gathering dews are gone
May pierce me --- does the rose regret
The day she did her armour on?
In that the foul supplants the fair,
The coarse defeats the twice-refined,
Is food for thought, but not despair:
All will be easier when the mind
To meet the brutal age has grown
An iron cortex of its own.  
 
III.
No further from me than my hand
Is China that I loved so well;
Love does not help to understand
The logic of the bursting shell.
Perfect in dream above me yet
Shines the white cone of Fuji-San;
I wake in fear, and weep and sweat. . .
Weep for Yoshida, for Japan.
Logic alone, all love laid by,
Must calm this crazed and plunging star:
Sorrowful news for such as I,
Who hoped—with men just as they are,
Sinful and loving—to secure
A human peace that might endure.

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Comments

[yvonne]

this is wonderful