Ice World
Colin Cheney
[The poem is drawn from a series of poems called Psalms for Hal Clement. Each poem’s title is drawn from a novel by Hal Clement, the pen name of Harry C. Stubbs, often referred to as the father of “hard” science fiction.]
The day my aunt went into surgery, I stood
by the pond, light singing in its ice, trying
to say the eutrophied waters, meaning
profusion, overage of life, carry an echo
of Turner’s ice saws, four hundred years ago,
heaving up that chaotic world, of blocks
wrapped in burlap and hauled into Boston.
Early last century, a young Hans Hörbiger
saw molten steel poured over snow
and the earth beneath explode, and believed
this fire and ice to be how the universe was
born. Rejecting that all things curve
toward time, as the “Jewish Science,”
suggested, the Nazis made
the refrigeration engineer’s theory
that the Milky Way was blocks of brilliant ice
their official cosmology in the years
before the war. Hal, we always pull
the heavens down around us don’t we? We beg
correspondence, a narcotic of believing
what we have created of ourselves?
Some said the Galileo orbiter’s fall into Jupiter’s
clouds could be seen months
afterward: dark flaring, sign of ceramic
plutonium-238 scattered
on entry. That this was something we
did deliberately is almost not human, I think,
or at least the best we have managed for some while,
not wanting to risk a trace of our sort
of life falling to Europa’s ice, wanting
to leave at least that much not us. Or maybe we kept
another desire intact: wondering what might be?
In those mechanics, God & bacteria
arced between the moons whose laws
of motion Galileo, 70 years old, chose to deny
though he knew better.