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Gretchen Rockwell

Everybody Remembers Neil and Buzz

          a quarto for Mike Collins

​but    who remembers                                                                                          that    solitary    orbit
the third man    left                                                                                                   circling   the Moon
without    video feed                                                                                                     perpetual   night
no voices  joining his                                                                                                except      for when
check-ins come   like                                                                                           circling   into sunlight
brief coronas    winking                                                                                      in     and     out      and
—gone   all he can do    is wait                                                                          darkness falls     again
 
 
he floats weightless through                                                                       the void of space   around
the black    with only stars                                                                      the dark side    and a shuttle   
for company   he doesn't                                                                             try to describe    the sights
talk about    the feeling of being                                                                the solitary body   circling  
slowly pulled    into darkness                                                                       without rest   or disaster
wobbling slightly  before                                                                         righting course   one time— 
waking up       and radioing in                                                                      ask about the astronauts
to see if they had         landed                                                                      see    if they made history

Commentary

Gretchen on "Everybody Loves Neil and Buzz":

The seed of this poem came from the wonderful recent documentary about the Apollo 11 mission—a timely release, as the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing is this month. At one point in the documentary, I was struck by some statements about the third man on the mission, Mike Collins, who piloted the command module Columbia around the Moon while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed in the Eagle and made history. The narrator mentioned that as Collins orbited, he was unable to communicate with NASA or the lander. As the documentary continued, I couldn't stop thinking about how lonely and intense that solo journey might have been, and knew I wanted to write about it (and him) in some way.

As I sat down to write, I realized the “quarto” form I invented would be the perfect one for the poem. The quarto is named after the old printing style (best known to me from Shakespeare) where four pages were printed on one large sheet of paper, then folded into a pamphlet or book. Thus, in my quarto form, there are four stanzas (ABCD): each standalone, yet part of one unified piece.

There are four ways to read a quarto: A/B/C/D, AB/CD, AC/BD, and ABCD. That is, the AB/CD (horizontal pairs) and AC/BD (vertical pairs) are about separate (but related) topics, and you must ultimately be able to read across each line of the entire poem so the entire text forms one cohesive poem. The final stipulation for the quarto is that it must be "for" someone—the "I" can be a part of the poem, but it must not be the focus. (I've had a few other quartos published; they're on my website if you'd like other examples of the form.) I love both the challenge of quartos and that the point is to write them for other people. Certainly, they're about and for me in some ways, but every quarto is inherently a gift, and I love how that shapes the way I approach both the writing process and the poem.

Given these elements of the quarto—being 'for' someone, the form balancing between isolation and connection, the aspect of each piece fitting into a whole—it seemed like the perfect way to write about Mike Collins, both an integral person to Apollo 11's mission and the person who was so disconnected from the most memorable event of said mission that he is sometimes referred to as "the forgotten astronaut."

Biography

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​Gretchen Rockwell is a queer poet and supplemental instructor of English at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, RI. Xer work has appeared in Glass: Poets Resist, Into the Void, Noble/Gas Qtrly, Crab Fat Review, and the minnesota review, as well as in other publications. Xe enjoys writing poetry about gender and sexuality, history, space, and unusual connections. Find xer on Twitter at @daft_rockwell or at xer website, www.gretchenrockwell.com.
 
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