—after a video of light playing on blinds,"Singing Rings of Saturn"
by C.A.Conrad, and Blake's "Emanations"
The rings of Saturn singing,today the air a hint less cold;
we live on Enceladus...you, who judge
by what you know, you call it that, and think it
moon; to us, it's
(phonetically, a longsigh, broken by the sound of bells)—
our word for home. Being as we are,
memory's orphaned daughters, we live on other's myths,
and on the distant drama of the storms
that swirl on Saturn's surface, far below
its turning rings, and, in the pulsing music
as they spin, we hear again the looms on which
our dreams were strung, the shuttle's clack and treadle's hum.
Our atmosphere's acoustic, and carries sound
in its scintillant crystal air; our towering geysers
and ice volcanoes feed the particles of ice and dust
that ring our vaporous neighboring star,
and, turning, sing to us.
We are, perhaps, extenuations of that which once
was there, resembling what you call fox-fire,
a kind of bio-luminescence, the glow of rot,
phosphoric light that generates no heat, is just what emanates
from what is mostly gone. That's why
we flicker, brightening and fading,
a haze that shifts, mood-ridden; at times we pale
until we are a bluish-gray, a smear,
a sway of smoke all but invisible against the ice.
What brightens us and feeds our luminescence
is the constant song,
the singing of the circling rings
that never ends and never is the same.
For then we are relieved of mind,
its mocking, flittering mirrors
in which our own reflection cuts us to the quick,
though it cannot touch the ice of Enceladus.
But we have said too much, for now we feel
your alien eyes, we feel you watching us...
And so are gone: withdrawn into the fissures,
where misery keeps to itself, and won't,
as long as the watchers are waiting there,
be coaxed out again.
