BW33: Mary Jo Salter

 

Happy Sunday!  This week we celebrate the birthday of American poet, Mary Jo Salter, who is co editor of the Norton Anthology of Poetry and a professor at John Hopkins University  

Discovery

By

Mary Jo Salter

6:48 a.m., and leaden
little jokes about what heroes
we are for getting up at this hour.
Quiet. The surf and sandpipers running.
T minus ten and counting, the sun
mounting over Canaveral
a swollen coral, a color
bright as camera lights. We’re blind-
sided by a flash:

shot from the unseen
launching pad, and so from nowhere,

a flame-tipped arrow—no, an airborne

pen on fire, its ink a plume

of smoke which, even while zooming

upward, stays as oddly solid

as the braided tail of a tornado,

and lingers there as lightning would

if it could steal its own thunder.

—Which, when it rumbles in, leaves

under or within it a million

firecrackers going off, a thrill

of distant pops and rips in delayed

reaction, hitting the beach in fading

waves as the last glint of shuttle

receives our hands’ eye-shade salute:

the giant point of all the fuss soon

smaller than a star.

Only now does a steady, low

sputter above us, a lawn mower

cutting a corner of the sky,

grow audible. Look, it’s a biplane!—

some pilot’s long-planned, funny tribute

to wonder’s always-dated orbit

and the itch of afterthought. I swat

my ankle, bitten by a sand gnat:
what the locals call no-see-’ums.

Happy Birthday to Mary Jo Salter!

Our A to Z and Back again letter and word of the week are T and Tangible.

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