Voyager

Beyond the moon, beyond planet blue

and planet red, each day further

from the sun she floats out toward

the empty dark of X. Having done

what she was sent out years before

to do, she gave up sending even

the faintest signals back to earth,

to bend instead her shattered wings

across her breast for warmth. It is

late, he knows, and knows it will only

go on getting later. He shifts alone

in the late November light before

her grave, as so often he has done

these past five years, to try

and finish what he knows to be

unfinished business and must remain

that way: this one-way dialogue

between the self, and--in her absence--

the mother in himself. Epilogue, perhaps,

to what one man might do to heal

the shaken ghost which must at last admit

just how many years ago she logged off

on her journey. So that now, as darkness

drops about him like some discarded coat,

old but useful, such as his mother used

to wear, he takes it to him, much as

she did, to ward against the cold.