christopher cokinos
2nd Place Winner of the Beautiful Pause Prize 2025
Station Keeping
From the capsule’s hatch, which is
the low mesh flap of your tent,
you begin the EVA only to stop.
There are fir trees in orbit
with you, and granite,
and a lake in the far dark.
In the high country, in September,
you are interplanetary,
you are terrestrial.
There is a schema
for black skies but this one
has no number. The other
astronauts say it’s unimaginable
–the tides of light around them
from visor and window.
On your belly by the dirt, you agree,
warm body, cold face, and
you stare at the wild, wider home.
Where, at dusk, a goshawk perched,
Cassiopeia takes the ridge, and the green
rhizome of Andromeda slowly
grows in the void.
You unfold yourself beside
late fleabane to pee.
When, at dawn, you’ll wake again
to look outside the craft, you’ll see
phosphine glow from
brilliant Venus, and it’s then
you’ll understand. No one
explained the mission. It is,
instead of loneliness,
to be the mountain and the scree,
to be the grateful root and apogee.
A Diorama of Ontologists
Meaning is meal. Even futility gives up.
Abandonment leaves the cave with its soot and root smell
of braised meat : sinew in ash that becomes ash. Breathing
holds its breath but it’s too early and it’s boring.
To fill the time you develop a taxonomy of shadows.
They too have their habits. You set up a blind.
You hold a clipboard and deploy the watch.
Intriguing birdcall circles dark pools, the falling
under branches, the cavern.
Beside a glacier, smoke rises while someone sews an eyelid shut
but would rather hunt or be hunted, sleep or be awakened
by two or more familiar arms. Ontologists beget eschatology.
Therefore, you keep the data to yourself
to submit later to That Review of Cloudy Days.
christopher cokinos
is the author, most recently, of Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow (Pegasus Books, 2024), which was named to The Aurarist Best Written Nonfiction for 2024 and the Toronto Globe & Mail Best Books of the Year. He’s written immersive nonfiction about extinct birds and about meteorites, that project taking him to Antarctica on an NSF artist’s fellowship. The winner of the New American Press Poetry Prize for The Underneath, he also co-edited Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (Arizona) with Julie Swarstad Johnson. His lyric essay collection is Bodies, of the Holocene (Truman). His poems and prose have appeared in Scientific American, High Country News, the Los Angeles Times, Orion and many other venues. Working with the Netherlands-based Moon Gallery, he is part of a team sending a tiny book to the Moon on a rover due to launch later this year.