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      January 12, 2016Major Tom Turns into LightColin Pope

      for David Bowie

      All those years of training and G-force tests
      and bone densities and the anti-gravitational
      endless drop in the belly of the airplane
      would be plenty to forge the metal
      of his genius into a NASA-approved alloy
      whereby the notion of death nested behind
      the vacuum of the eye sockets like an organ
      awaiting some second adolescence
      to begin churning its unpredictable hormone
      into the blood and since
       
      we believed in more
      we tuned in to watch the rocket ascend
      as though it were pulling our hearts behind
      the way a wedding car clanks its lovely cans
      toward a waterfall or white sand beach
      or a bed upon which a definition waits
      awakening and then proving over and over
      and over with the ink of moan and gasp
      until it disappears into a hope as perfect
      as a needle puncturing the sky
       
      which is why
      he was chosen to be lost and never found
      and spinning in a mass of every wire and element
      and sound the whole human race
      had taken millennia to discover for this one trip
      from which we knew he would not return
      since he knew there was nothing but limits
      and the blinding phosphorescent joy
      it would take to destroy them.

      from Poets Respond

      Colin Pope

      “I was always a huge Bowie fan. As soon as I heard about his passing I began writing poems frantically, simply to cope with the loss of such a giant talent. It was incredible to me that he could, in the span of a few seconds, move from the hopeful to the terrifying to the comically ironic. I remember hearing ‘Space Oddity’ for the first time. It was on the radio as my mother drove me home from school. We both stopped talking, almost automatically, as though there was a secret pact that we wouldn’t interrupt each other’s experience. That’s what Bowie was—an experience.”

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