✨ Tether

The reason I can’t...

Tether

The reason I can’t watch astronaut movies with you
is because there’s always a scene when the hero leaves the capsule

to fix something vital, a heat panel, say,
and they’re tethered to the mother ship

by just a slender umbilicus made of fiberglass
and desperation, a jerry-rigged bungee cord,

and inevitably something terrible happens, a cloud of space dust
or a chunk of meteorite, and the thing snaps,

hurling our conflicted protagonist into empty space
a human starfish stranded in inky nothingness,

with only the sound of his or her heartbeat thudding
inside the dying spacesuit, and although

there’s almost always a rescue,
the crew on the ship and Houston on the ground

somehow plot a Hail Mary trajectory
and catch the errant tumbleweed,

it’s such a fraught operation that I can’t bear to watch—
what if they fumble?—so I study you instead,

so absorbed in the drama you almost forget to breathe,
and sometimes I feel like I’m the mother ship

keeping you connected to earth, saying It’s eight o’clock,
stop playing the piano, it’s time to eat,

but then in other moments when I’m lost
in my work it’s you who tracks me down

from behind the computer, and makes me rejoin
the human race, your arms my landing strip.

And I know there comes a day when one of us
breaks this fraying leash of flesh

and goes tumbling toward the great unknown,
while the other is left holding an empty rein, wondering
where did all the singing go? How frail
the filaments that bind us to this life appear

to me now that I confess; you’ve been my anchor
all these years, it’s the beams of love raying out

from your green eyes that tether me here.

—Alison Luterman

✨ This poem is offered in honor of our February theme: Love & Beauty

From Hard Listening, Wildhouse Publishing, Copyright © 2025. Used by permission of the poet. Photo by Bryan Goff, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.