Heavenly Father, please don’t let me email the wrong person.

Please don’t let me hit “reply all”

when I mean to reply only to Pete.

 

Please don’t let me find myself at a red light,

windows down, volume up,

in the middle of my best Whitney Houston routine,

with one of my neighbors in the next car staring.

 

If I should, astonished, stand before

an automatic door, waving my hand in a manner

that suggests I believe I’m a Jedi, please

don’t let the person behind me be a trustee

for the institution where I am employed.

 

I humiliate myself every day, and yet—

I want to throw myself into traffic, and yet—

I long to preserve what little dignity I have, and yet—

 

something inside me yearns

to turn to the next person in the grocery line

and ask the most random shit:

 

Did you know that because it crosses

the international date line, Alaska is the most

eastern and most western state?

 

Did you know that the record for the most

live rattlesnakes held by the tail

in a person’s mouth is thirteen?

 

Did you know people can glow in the dark

but our eyes aren’t sensitive enough to see it?

 

Did you want to know any of this?

Well, buckle up because you’re about to find out.

 

My internal monologue is just an old man at the gates

helplessly shouting Don’t say the weird thing

don’t say the weird thing don’t say the weird thing

don’t say the

                        Too late.

 

Like a satellite launched from the Earth,

that weird thing is now part of the cosmos, orbiting

this small life, with me down here unable to reel it back.

 

The farthest man-made object from Earth

is Voyager 1. Sent into space shortly after my birth,

it’s now many billion miles outside the reaches

of our solar system. Obsolete. Slightly broken.

 

It sometimes goes silent for months.

It sometimes sends unintelligible bursts of binary riddles.

Sometimes it just plays dead. 

 

But last week it sprang to life again, and started

whispering the secrets of the universe to us once more.

 

I find a vast and incorruptible calmness in that.

 

To exist far beyond the noise of this place.

 

To be made by humans but to feel utterly separate from them.

 

To feel that separation widen into a chasm that spans

the length of galaxies.

 

To drift farther and farther into the quiet.

 

And even then, to continue composing and transcribing

little messages, and to continue sending them home.