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There is something about those that die in the service of seeking, in the process of wayfinding. I have always been a kid entranced by space, born as I was a month before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I am a child of the space age, and my eyes are often on the sky looking marvelling at the jewelbox of possibility and scale that enfolds us. And so the deaths of astronauts are always a little bit like the death of a small part of me, the part that always wanted to go to space.

It’s not as if the seven deaths above Texas this morning were any more or less important or significant or even tragic as the 40 people that died in a train crash in Zimbabwe, the 7 students that died in an avalanche in the Rockies, or the 10 people that died in Indonesia in a landslide. All of these deaths, tragic accidents, disasters for families and communities, all of them simply resonate on a day when accidental death is in the news, perhaps even as a prelude to scores of deliberate deaths to come.

At any rate, today I found a poem by John Yau, which speaks remarkably well to the events of today, whatever continent they happened on. The poems are love poems, reflecting the real tragedy in loss, the loss of connection, deep and familiar like that of a family or shallow and distant like that of a man whose transcended childhood is composed of so many dreams of flying in space.

Borrowed Love Poems

1.

What can I do, I have dreamed of you so much
What can I do, lost as I am in the sky

What can I do, now that all
the doors and windows are open

I will whisper this in your ear
as if it were a rough draft

something I scribbled on a napkin
I have dreamed of you so much

there is no time left to write
no time left on the sundial

for my shadow to fall back to earth
lost as I am in the sky

2.

What can I do, all the years that we talked
and I was afraid to want more

What can I do, now that these hours
belong to neither you nor me

Lost as I am in the sky
What can I do, now that I cannot find

the words I need
when your hair is mine

now that there is no time to sleep
now that your name is not enough

3.

What can I do, if a red meteor wakes the earth
and the color of robbery is in the air

Now that I dream of you so much
my lips are like clouds

drifting above the shadow of one who is asleep
Now that the moon is enthralled with a wall

What can I do, if one of us is lying on the earth
and the other is lost in the sky

4.

What can I do, lost as I am in the wind
and lightning that surrounds you

What can I do, now that my tears
are rising toward the sky

only to fall back
into the sea again

What can I do, now that this page is wet
now that this pen is empty

5.

What can I do, now that the sky
has shut its iron door

and bolted clouds
to the back of the moon

now that the wind
has diverted the ocean’s attention

now that a red meteor
has plunged into the lake

now that I am awake
now that you have closed the book

6.

Now that the sky is green
and the air is red with rain

I never stood in
the shadow of pyramids

I never walked from village to village
in search of fragments

that had fallen to earth in another age
What can I do, now that we have collided

on a cloudless night
and sparks rise

from the bottom of a thousand lakes

7.

To some, the winter sky is a blue peach
teeming with worms

and the clouds are growing thick
with sour milk

What can I do, now that the fat black sea
is seething

now that I have refused to return
my borrowed dust to the butterflies

their wings full of yellow flour

8.

What can I do, I never believed happiness
could be premeditated

What can I do, having argued with the obedient world
that language will infiltrate its walls

What can I do, now that I have sent you
a necklace of dead dried bees

and now that I want to
be like the necklace

and turn flowers into red candles
pouring from the sun

9.

What can I do, now that I have spent my life
studying the physics of good-bye

every velocity and particle in all the waves
undulating through the relapse of a moment’s fission

now that I must surrender this violin
to the sea’s foaming black tongue

now that January is almost here
and I have started celebrating a completely different life

10.

Now that the seven wonders of the night
have been stolen by history

Now that the sky is lost and the stars
have slipped into a book

Now that the moon is boiling
like the blood where it swims

Now that there are no blossoms left
to glue to the sky

What can I do, I who never invented
anything

and who dreamed of you so much
I was amazed to discover

the claw marks of those
who preceded us across this burning floor