Hey, Alicia

This is a long overdue reunion.

For years I've scoured my poetry bookshelf, trying to find that damn poem about the UFOs and getting married. I tried google, too, but you try "wedding poem ufo" and see what happens.

I found your book at Half Price--it looked oddly familiar, like one I'd scoured through years before. And then I remembered reading it, copying it, forsaking other library duties (I have always been a horrible library employee) in order to soak it all in.

Today I was looking through, trying to find a love poem, and I found one I think I was asked to memorize and recite to my class. It was about teaching. At that point, I knew what I was doing for the next two years: I was prepared for "The Class," I was ready to be "grateful for whatever comes," I suspected I'd be facing 30 faces all frowning at Emily.

And frown they did.

So here it is: are you ready? I hope this isn't breaking any copyright laws. I just want everyone to read this damn poem that haunted me for upwards of five years.

...

Extraterrestrial: A Wedding Poem for Nina and John, January 2, 1989

Do the angels really
reabsorb only the radiance that steamed out from themselves, or
sometimes, as if by an oversight, is there a trace
of our essence in it as well?

Rilke, Second Duino Elegy

Nina and John: there are spaceships circling above us
This afternoon in the raw of winter, the early
Dawn of a new year.

There are extraterrestrial visitors thoughtfully watching
Our cerulean globe spin through its void. As they monitor
Our minor destinies,

If they are able to shiver they do so, hugging
their bodies, if they have bodies. To them we seem
Perfectly lovely,

A blue-green marble such as a boy would be happy
To keep in his pocket. They watch us pursue our orderly
Orbit around the

Local star upon which our lives completely
Depend, they enjoy the cooling and warming, they clap
Their hands to see it

If they have hands--or perhaps they clap their feelers
Or wave their antennae--they find us a charming spectacle,
Comic and tragic.

At times, too, with their expanded senses,
More powerful than our own, with a subtlety able
To register fainter

Signals, but also different sorts of signals,
Not only melodious optic, thundering ultraviolet,
Stridulous X-rays--

Their receptors can pick up what William Blake
Used to call "beams of love": those emanations
Emitted by lovers

That lift from the planet, like particles lighter than air,
Or rather, zap from it, waves more potent than lasers
Pulsing their message:

We have formed a unit, people, we're loving each other,
We are doing it now, can you read us, it's
What we were born for.

To our visitors, such signals are like fireflies
On a summer evening, so pretty, and they like to
Sense the gradations.

Pure sex is the basic beat, a fast percussion.
Sex-plus-love a more eloquent flashing, through a richer
Combination of wavelengths.

The most splendid signal of course is that transmitted
By married lovers, for this one is perfect art
Wedded to nature.

It says: We're loving, we're working at it, it's like
Ascending Everest, we're playing, it's
Really sensational.

Different from everything else, it overwhelms us,
Seems to be making us stronger, more alive,
But also weaker--

Difficult, dangerous life, we are up to our eyeballs
In it, we'll never stop. And the visitors look at each other--
Nina and John, are you paying close attention--

Smiling, applauding, the way we do when children
Learning a skill perform some feat that is difficult,
Since learning to love is something

Like learning to walk, or swim, or ride a bicycle,
It's like writing poems, and maybe like writing history,
--Hard, but rewarding.

Go, say the visitors, mentally egging them on.
You're getting it, yes, you've got it, you can do it,
Congratulations.

They add their wishes to ours. Young man, young woman,
All of us wish you joy, in sex, in love,
And tonight in marriage.

I'm calling them visitors, picturing them in spaceships...
Who are they really? Maybe Rilke was right,
Maybe they're angels.

-Alicia Striker Ostriker
from The Crack in Everything