Special Piercings

Lachlan Mackinnon. The Jupiter Collisions. "A Crane Speaks".

It's not the bird. It's the hoisting mechanism at a rocket launch facility. The rigging's tautness and the speaker's "gauntness both recall"

mice playing on those weed-cracked concrete beds,
once Mercury's, once Gemini's, when space
was new,
             lost gantries at Canaveral
from which the rockets rose like arrowheads
to smash the heaven's azure carapace.

This is the end of the poem and I admire how Mackinnon marshals the assonance of the last line and the alliteration of the penultimate to emphasize the thrust of the image.

And so for day 307
17.10.2007