and flags and scraps of blue
above him make regatta of the day
—P.K. Page
The Glass Air: Poems Selected and New
I’ve read Canada
will be sending
POET to other worlds.
Though it’d be better to launch
a poet—to a planet
miming ours; such as TOI-
6716 b, discovered in ’26,
dubbing it Alicia instead—
as a troubadour
will often do,
the one who took a gavel to
your heart, leaving just the muse
to birth the verse; its woe,
its wonder, strophes of I would have
adored you more
if only—
surely, the real poet
in this charade
is of—unworthy
to be included in
the acronym; ghosted by
compression, how less & less
is more;
to languish in lower
case, the last one to be
picked when teams are chosen—
always the skins
and never the shirts, ribs that
brought the other
kids to snort—who never
offered yes when you
beseeched them for a dance—beneath
the gymnasium
lamps—which also may have chortled.
This has little to do with
planets over sixty-one
light years off.
Surely beyond the bounds
of a gasping
wordsmith—a childish astronaut:
one small step for poet;
one giant leap for poetkind,
ready to write of a
sea below the crag,
a stonescape gone vermillion,
this hollow, alien
sky bereft of clouds.
What wounds could
one convey—
to those who love alone?
Here and back on Earth:
froze in a candleless
corner, with Halfe & Brand &
Purdy, or maybe P.K. Page—
you’ve heard of her, right?
Don’t tell me that
her verses are
aboard the satellite, to somehow
serve as greeting to
a gangly, blue-
skinned marvel,
who will never have a
hint of what she shares,
doesn’t know of loss like
glass & air, has yet to hear
the sneers from a crater’s
pith,
or our very own,
when the rage
of a kindled rock
has missed its mark,
as though another’s
not on its way to
strike us down.
Andreas Gripp
April 30, 2026
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