Planetarium Field Trip

Sitting beside my teenage son
in the dark, I am dizzied by things
like a moving night sky
the idea that Jupiter has thirteen moons
that a tornado has been zinging
the planet for the past 400 years
that the sun has been exploding for five billion years
and my son has gotten to the age
where I can no longer touch him
in public.
Martian sand shines red, and
we live on a rock
that floats around in space
that I started my manse cycle today
and can’t concentrate on
the sonar or canyons, crescents, buttes of Mars
and that earlier my four-year-old
daughter refused to wear a nice dress
to school, but mix-matched for a rainbow effect
getting instead the bag lady look
that the planets whirl round and round
the sun in an expanding spiral
wheeling around.
I float and spin and grow nauseous.
The star light above fades as lights come back on.
I look at my sandy-haired, black-eyed boy
in the midst of his awe, his growing.
We are run by rhythms
we cannot see,
not the five o’clock traffic
but the sun’s coming and going,
the gravity of our lives.
The north star, Orion, Cassiopeia,
the moving water of our planet.