The Observatory: Bargaining with the Planets (a poem)
Alison McGhee
The newspaper reports that at twilight tonight Venus and Jupiter will conjoin
in the southwestern sky,
a fist and a half above the horizon.
They won't come together again for seventeen years.
What the article does not say is that Mercury, the
dark planet, will also be on hand.
He'll hover low, nearly invisible in a darkened sky.
I stare out the kitchen window toward the sunset.
Seventeen years from now, where
will I be?
Mercury, Roman god of commerce and luck,
let me propose a trade:
Auburn hair, muscles that don't ache, and a six-minute mile.
Here's what I'll give you in return:
My recipe for Brazilian seafood stew, a talent for
French-braiding, an excellent sense of smell and
the memory of having once kissed Sam W.
Then I see my girl across the room.
She stands on a stool at the sink,
washing her toy dishes and
swaying to a whispered song,
her dark curls a nimbus in the lamplight.
The planets are coming together now.
Minute by minute the time draws nigh for me to watch.
Minute by minute my child wipes dry her red
plastic knife, her miniature blue bowls.
Mercury, here's another offer, a real one:
Let her be.
You can have it all in return,
the salty stew, the braids, the excellent sense of smell
and the softness of Sam's mouth on mine.
And my life. That too.
All of it I give for this child, that seventeen years hence
she will stand in a distant kitchen, washing dishes
I cannot see, humming a tune I cannot hear.
-- Alison McGhee is a Minneapolis poet and fiction writer whose novel, "Rainlight," was just chosen as one of Library Journal's Best First Novels of 1998.
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