Thursday, February 2, 2012

TITAN



Titan
for Dylan Thomas
and Samuel Delany

__________________

“the elegant, long sentence
is a thing of beauty. A self-
contained entity worthy of
study all by itself. Consider
this sentence by Dylan Thomas
from Quite Early One Morning”
—Charles Johnson, “Telling It
Long and Telling It Short,”
E-Channel Sept 3, 2011
http://ethelbert-miller.blogspot.com/2011/09/telling-it-long-and-telling-it-short.html
___________________________________


“I was born on Titan at the end of the Great War —
an ugly, lovely moon (or so it was and is to me), beneath the crawling, sprawling, splendid curving rings of Saturn where truant boys and greedy old men from nowhere, beachcombing the rubble for gold and diamonds, idled and cruised the time away, the dock-bound spaceships streaming away into the wonders of the Ort Cloud, the magic of Neptune, the centuries-old millennial Pluto dazzlingly dark with its spectral buzz and the whining static of barking outcast dogs; the man-made castles and forts and harbors little outposts in the opening-up solar system, and on certain frequencies listening to the sadly weird echoes of strangers from the long-dead civilization of Alpha Centauri hanging about on the fringes of the known universe, as though it were wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that, ghostly-white waves full of interplanetary sadness."

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