Star Bus
As sails are raised by capstans
And currents lift the seas,
The rhythm of the ceiling fans
Clocks our own astronomies,
Which otherwise would tear apart
The lap and slip of tide
With the arbitrary stop and start
Of our boat’s celestial drive,
The tropic beat of fanning blades –
Guidebooks to the Stars –
Whose aimless spellbound drifting
Trades another world for ours:
Expect no vision from those star-crossed
Eyes, bewitched by every passing spark –
Blinded, every shudder multiplies,
And waves grow larger in the dark –
But the throbbing of the blood,
Like the music of the spheres,
Steadies the arhythmic flood
Of our disastrous ideas,
Setting watches in the night
With heaven’s second hands,
Trimming a theodolite
To bus constellations to their fans.
Explanation
This poem suffered through a complex evolution of simplistic contrasts: a motorboat against a sail, the deep structures of wind and sea against the solipsistic, false strictures of an Evinrude, the pathetic fallacy of our small anchors against the vast chaotic patterns of oceans, so that we weave our erroneous way through deeper seas based on mistakes, false scents, and cheap compasses, while around us truth rages like waves, as I myself wove my way through contradictory and mixed-up metaphors (while somewhere out of sight rhyme raged) to the final unifying noctilucence of Gegenschein, St. Elmo’s fire, that eerie form of lightning that flickers like fireflies around masts of ships in deep sea on becalmed nights.
When I was young I had a telescope which I saved up my allowance to buy. It had setting circles for right ascension and declination, to lock onto star coordinates, which always reminded me of Donne’s “without sharp north, without declining west” from “The Good Morrow.”
My original idea was to suggest the otherworldly forces that design our ends despite ourselves, and in fact the ignis fatuus, the fateful fire, descended on me fitfully in just the random way it descends on my floundering sailor, solving in the last few minutes the clueless puzzle I had set for myself in the mischievous way ice arranges trees into elusive but accurate carols of childhood, the way sleighs lost in snow conjure up a Cantor Set of infinitely receding Christmases, like mirrors in a mirror, to mix metaphors until sleep overwhelms me.
After I’d written the first few drafts of "Phosphor," thinking of Prospero, I was also reminded of the irony in the line in Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 116" about love:
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
A decade later I felt the boat metaphor was too easy, and overhauled the poem to cover as well a tour bus in Hollywood visiting the homes of the stars, whose lightning guides our disastrous, if not stellar course.
I finally felt the best metaphor for being lost in space was a ceiling fan, whose blades both steady and fragment the tropical night. I eliminated the lightning as too obvious, in my new quest to focus on smaller details, the way Vermeer does.
All these influences made the poem, but in the end the purpose of a poem is to remove the scaffolding and let the building stand on its own.
Phosphor notes: December 21, 1998; April 17, 1999
Star Bus note: Lanikai, September 20, 2008
Revised: Kaiholu, July 16, 2024