saturn v (first stage)

It seems all one piece.
One bright white pencil, checkered black,
larger than large in xenon floods:
already alien.

Around its base machines and men swarm.
Daylight finds its steeple first,
impartial light slides down its length,
strikes diamonds from the snow that cases it. Mist flows.

When it begins it seems so slow a rise.

Pillows of flame support it, cradling. Lazily
this spire decides to wake up after all, and
grumbling, shakes umbilicals away.

five F-1 engines take slide-rule sums tipped with people
tiny, dwarfed by their machine,

thrust them forty-two miles up the sky
in not quite three hot minutes,
gobbling four million
four hundred thousand pounds of go.

What must it be
to be the cupped hands underneath a nation’s boot
to light a candle
(that will in some days and two hundred thousand miles
warm the dead face of a distant mythic disc)
to wrench a stack of parts and men
four hundred feet per second out from gravity’s dark womb,
to thrust conquistadors toward their unknown shore?

but it is just those hands that make a step,
the first step.

First stage: not three minutes gone, and spent. It does not let go:
rejected by its successor, eight little thrusts, it’s spurned.
and now the living stack is on its way, past max-Q,
rebelling from the oldest mother anyone can know.

Five guttered engines,
vast and scorched, ablated, mouthless,
still silent in the airless dark, go cold:

what’s left of their force lifts S-1C still,
introduces solitude.

Without the others it describes an arc
(already slide-ruled, predetermined, months before)
higher and higher, till all the world shines blue.

It seems so slow a rise.

Sixty-eight miles up, not fast enough to slip its bonds, it reaches apogee
before it is called home.

Is it pride that crystallizes
on those white flanks, as they fall?
does it know that in its death
it makes possible a life?

The ocean rises to receive its shell. Water is kind.
Embraced and cradled, it is drowned to sleep.

Four days later its journey is complete:
man sets his bootprint
on another world.