Let’s Talk About Mercury …

Mercury is cool … both the planet and the element.  Neither is very friendly to human life.  There is, of course, a Mercury that is crucially important to modern human life, at least a happy one, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about really.  Even though we love you, Freddie, this is not your post.

No, right now I am thinking of the planet and an image I just saw that is supposedly the clearest picture ever taken of the planet mercury.  It’s pretty gorgeous, and I can’t look at it without thinking about Alice Oswald and her wonderful poem “Excursion to the Planet Mercury“.  I think maybe each enhances the other.  Check’em out:

 

Ain’t it beautiful?  Deceptively so, perhaps … perhaps not.  Let’s ask Alice.

 

Excursion to the Planet Mercury

 

certain evenings a little before the golden
foam of the horizon has properly hardened
you can see a tiny iron island
very close indeed to the sun.

all craters and mirrors, the uncanny country
of the planet Mercury – a mystery
without I without air,
without you without sound.

in that violently magic little place
the sky is racing along
like a blue wrapper flapped and let go
from a car window.

now hot now cold
the ground moves fast,
a few stones frisk about
looking for a foothold

but it shales it slides
the whole concept is only
loosely fastened
to a few weak tweaks of gravity.

o the weather is dreadful there:
thousand-year showers of dust
all dandruff and discarded shells
of creatures too weak to exist:

paupers beggars toughs
boys in dresses
who come alive and crumble
at the mercy of metamorphosis.

no nothing accumulates there
not even mist
nothing but glimmering beginnings
making ready to manifest.

as for the catastrophe
of nights on Mercury,
hiding in a rock-smashed hollow
at about two hundred degrees below zero

the feather-footed winds
take off their guises there,
they go in gym shoes
thieving and lifting

and their amazed expressions
have been soundproofed, nevertheless
they go on howling
for gladness, sheer gladness

– Alice Oswald

If you  haven’t read any Alice Oswald before, what have you been doing with your life?  She’s amazing, and her Spacecraft Voyager 1: New and Selected Poems is highly recommended as a good place to get familiar with her work.  Also … it should be noted, her work is best appreciated when read aloud.  Do it.

Special thanks to these guys, who had the poem online.