Photometric Observations of Exoplanet Transits

and flags and scraps of blue

above him make regatta of the day

—P.K. Page

The Glass Air: Poems Selected and New

I’ve read Canada

will be sending

POET to other worlds.

Though it’d be better to launch

a poet—to a planet

miming ours; such as TOI-

6716 b, discovered in ’26,

dubbing it Alicia instead—

as a troubadour

will often do,

the one who took a gavel to

your heart, leaving just the muse

to birth the verse; its woe,

its wonder, strophes of I would have

adored you more

if only—

surely, the real poet

in this charade

is of—unworthy

to be included in

the acronym; ghosted by

compression, how less & less

is more;

to languish in lower

case, the last one to be

picked when teams are chosen—

always the skins

and never the shirts, ribs that

brought the other

kids to snort—who never

offered yes when you

beseeched them for a dance—beneath

the gymnasium

lamps—which also may have chortled.

This has little to do with

planets over sixty-one

light years off.

Surely beyond the bounds

of a gasping

wordsmith—a childish astronaut:

one small step for poet;

one giant leap for poetkind,

ready to write of a

sea below the crag,

a stonescape gone vermillion,

this hollow, alien

sky bereft of clouds.

What wounds could

one convey—

to those who love alone?

Here and back on Earth:

froze in a candleless

corner, with Halfe & Brand &

Purdy, or maybe P.K. Page—

you’ve heard of her, right?

Don’t tell me that

her verses are

aboard the satellite, to somehow

serve as greeting to

a gangly, blue-

skinned marvel,

who will never have a

hint of what she shares,

doesn’t know of loss like

glass & air, has yet to hear

the sneers from a crater’s

pith,

or our very own,

when the rage

of a kindled rock

has missed its mark,

as though another’s

not on its way to

strike us down.

Andreas Gripp

April 30, 2026

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