The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > ISSUE FORTY: Jun-Aug (07) > Poetry >Alex Grant - Four Parsecs in a Bri-nylon Shirt

–On seeing "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage," after 25 years


Unnaturally dark-haired, our hero saunters
through a faithful recreation of the library
at Alexandria, in a polo-neck sweater

and houndstooth hacking jacket. In tan
leisure suits and swirling, trippy kipper ties,
he pilots the blessed ship of the imagination.

His bridgework–monumental, marbled
Taj Mahal of dentition–glints like a dying
supernova. "Cosmos vs. Chaos" he intones–

"Order versus confusion." The numbers pile
up like star-clusters–"Fifty billion trillion stars."
"Three hundred trillion times denser than lead–

a single teaspoon of this material would
weigh more than The Empire State Building."
Yes, but think how many decorative paperweights

it would make. And for all of this, we forgive
you, Professor–we forgive the safari jackets, the ties
you wore with sub-zero parkas and Lycra spacesuits,

as we forgive ourselves for those mirrored
days, nano-seconds ago on the cosmic calendar,
when everything seemed possible and the universe

had yet to declare its undeniably intelligent design.









Alex Grant's chapbook, Chains & Mirrors, was awarded the 2006 Randall Jarrell Prize and won the 2007 Oscar Arnold Young Award for best book of poetry by a North Carolina poet. He was the 2004 winner of WMSU's Pavel Srut Poetry Fellowship, won first prize in the 2006 Kakalak Carolina Poets Anthology contest(2007 special guest contributor), and has been finalist or runner-up for Tupelo Press's Dorset Prize, The Felix Pollak and Brittingham Prizes, Discovery/The Nation (twice,) The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, The Arts & Letters Poetry Prize (4 times) and The Writers at Work Fellowship, among others. His manuscript, Fear of Moving Water, was one of six finalists for the 2006 Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook contest, and he was nominated for Meridian's Best New Poets anthology in 2005, 2006 and 2007. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Nation, Connecticut Review, North American Review, Nimrod, Cream City Review, Poetry Southeast and Seattle Review, among others. He divides his personal time between Chapel Hill and Carrboro, where he lives with his wife, his dangling participles and his Celtic fondness for excess.
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