12.
do you remember the space fever?: year of
Halley’s visit, year of the next flight, of the woman,
teacher, now astronaut: even Punky Brewster felt it,
announcing her intention to ascend: my family
took a telescope out to suburban lightlessness,
military, to see the comet: conditions, cloudy: my
brothers said they saw it: maybe it was there, but
I saw only grey of night: I remember being cold:
and there was the excitement of the shuttle,
the launch to be televised, and the teacher to be sent
into orbit: a lesson plan in dreaming: the scheduled flight
opened new possibility, ordinary woman, teacher
turned hero, scheduled for classroom consumption,
for space delirium, in America, past midnight
on this other side of earth: I crawled to the lounge
alone to make sure the VCR was programmed right
and then stayed alone to watch: at least I seem
to remember this: alone, not comprehending
those seventy-three seconds until later, blanking out
the hush of failure: and Punky, haunted by the failure,
Punky having nightmares, opening the lesion
that left her abandoned in the shopping mall, and now
sending the missive of her grief to the only place
that could comprehend it: NASA answering with
a gift, a moon man, Buzz: Buzz, always second,
Buzz the proselytiser of other orbs: Buzz, man
of radical perspective, Dr Rendezvous, survivor
of unthinkable dreams: Buzz, living relic of living
after: and the explosion a landmark for the psych
studies of trauma, how we process, remember, it:
the children with a photographic memory of that
not-quite minute and a half, the children writing
diaries, drawing shuttles, the children predicting
future calamity, just Christa’s death: it was pretty much
the worst thing that ever happened to me: and me,
who also watched, and replaced catastrophe with numb
Kate Middleton is an Australian writer. She is the author of the poetry collections Fire Season, awarded the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry in 2009, Ephemeral Waters and Passage. In 2020 she was runner up for the Australian Book Review’s Calibre Award.