Michael Levan has poems appearing recently in Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, American Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, and Heron Tree, as well as CutBank's 40th anniversary anthology and Southern Poetry Anthology VI: Tennessee. He teaches writing at the University of Saint Francis and lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his wife, Molly, and son, Atticus. ---------
Poet’s Guide to the Wow! Signal
1977, sticky August night,
you hunched over printouts,
scanning radio waves for some intelligent
design, and there it was:
seventy-two seconds’ worth
of loud spiking higher than
any background noise could,
arrow-shower sent from Sagittarius
120 light-years away, dead-center
bull’s-eye you marked Wow!
What else could you have written
after so much time hunting
for proof, for someone to make life
less glitch, more purpose.
For the universe to help you fix
what’s wrong because alone
has always been too much to bear.
You’ve only heard it again
like you hear your child calling
for you as you slip into sleep,
your startled self running
to the bedroom to find all
is well, your child curled into
a ball, slight snore ringing the dark.
Which is to say your imagination
creates a fiction you desperately want,
this one from some place light
won’t reach for another century and a score,
a signal sweeping around planet or star
the way a lighthouse beam does,
vast arc that hasn’t circled back yet.
Or maybe it’s a tug on the cosmic fishing line
which doesn’t prove you have a fish,
but does suggest you keep your line in the water.
There is no shortage of metaphor
that can render mystery real,
no less a desire than this:
to wave a target over your head
and beg to be noticed,
to make a connection
across all this emptiness.