for John McCullough


Every year throughout primary school,
despite my love for manipulating language,
my career test always gave a result of science:

biochemist, geologist, meteorologist.
Indeed, as a boy my pursuits were
boyish—bathroom experiments mixing

random powders and perfumes (in hope,
I suppose, of building a bomb?), inspecting
ready-made chlorophyll cell-slides

through a microscopic lens, comparing
textures in a box of special rocks
that my mother had bought for me—

mica, onyx, quartz, bloodstone, malachite—
each stone held in its labeled square
by a tiny dab of glue. Weather

proved stranger, and as time passed
I followed storms and twisters more often
since they seemed less explicable.

Later, what I read gravitated toward
outer space, the cosmic reaches . . .
which was, of course, imagined innerspace;

how our rubbish would be shot by rocket
to other planets, or the floating satellite
colonies we’d someday reside inside of

(with greenhouse gardens, swimming pools),
once the earth no longer had room for us.
And always the nagging wonder, at age 11,

whether or not I’d find there my ghost-
brother of the spirit-level, counting down
the index of night, waving his hands

over stars and clouds, distant blue oceans
and white mountains left behind, long ago.



by Jason Roush