Three Years After We Left for Saturn
BY Shastra Deo
You were wearing your bolo tie
with precious gems harvested
by the first boiadeiro on Juno.
You missed seeing Venus with
your naked eye. You were an
expert at all manoeuvres tested
by the Department of Transport
and Main Roads, tucked
your seatbelt under your arm
despite the likelihood of double
demerit points. I was pulling you
through the universe, a passenger
princess projecting my aura
through nearby Bluetooth speakers.
I gripped the meat of your thigh.
I had a confession: I’m not so good
with language. You said my aura
was chatty. You said you didn’t
want distinct lives. You wanted
to live on an uninhabited planet
outside the Einstein–Rosen bridge.
You wanted a garden but not to
garden. I wanted a fishpond filled
with minnow. Too much has been
said about koi. This was not a rescue
mission. We were searching for a
galaxy made of breath and vectors.
We were the first of our species.
Everything was normal on Earth.
In ancient days men looked at
stars and saw their mythologies;
this century’s lesbians do much of
the same. When they landed on the
god of war your matter was still
composite particles sparking
sacred fire on 4 Vesta. When they
landed on the god of war I was trying
to come home. We had a job to do.
Neither of us said it, but we both
knew: falling in love, well, that
little manoeuvre would cost us
fifty-one years. Maybe more
if we’re lucky. Sorry. My aura
was chartreuse. You were
quoting some other astronaut
when you said love was another
dimension like time and space—
the only thing stronger than gravity.
I was thinking about the last time
I watched you from the kitchen sink.
During our first year I was thirty
-four for a decade. In the new world
I will look good in chartreuse.
Three years after we leave for Saturn
the space we swim through dithers
between particle and wave. I have
a confession: I wanted to write
a poem without evasive manoeuvres.
Or about two particles separated
by one billion years of light, how
despite distance they still reach for
each other. At the kitchen sink I
chopped green beans with a butter
knife. At the bridge I am entangling
myself with your outline in the universe.
We still have a job to do. But
‘I got gravity,’ you say, ‘I got
space, I got time, and I got you.’
And my aura gleams green as the
Lagoon nebula in Gemini South.
I have a confession: the three
years after we left for Saturn
were the happiest days of my life.
In a stranger’s galaxy only two
sorts of motion are possible—the
human mouth, uttering. One hand
enclosing another hand, holding tight.
Shastra Deo was born in Fiji, raised in Melbourne, and lives in Brisbane. Her first book, The Agonist (UQP 2017), won the 2016 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and the 2018 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her second book, The Exclusion Zone, was recently published by University of Queensland Press. She is still living.