Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made

After the Great Moon Hoax of 1835

1. Virginia, 2011

Batboy leans against the Camaro he boosted earlier
and smokes a cigarette, lets carcinogenic fog
dance against streetlights,
watches it rise to meet the moon.

He was a soldier once, he thinks. It was in all the papers.
Well, just the one. The Weekly World News, but it has readership –
not like those other rags regurgitating City Council minutes
and the high school football scores, the ones which dwindle
like embers in the distance – smoldering, irrelevant, gone.

The Weekly World News is different. Only paper brave enough
to tell the truth: that monsters can serve their country, that monsters
can go to war. Not like the clean-cut Fox News soldiers –
square-jawed, All-American. Their soldiers are superheroes
until they come out gay, until they join an Occupy crowd
and are beaten by some jumped up Oakland cop
who’s never seen real combat.

That defies the narrative. That’s a little too human
for the nightly news at 10.

Batboy flicks his cigarette to street and wanders down the sidewalk.
It was only a joyride. He never meant to keep the car. Just something
to get adrenaline pumping. It’ll be in the news again, next week.
That paper follows him everywhere, omnipresent as the moon.

He looks to the sky,
thinks “Vespertilio-homo”
and wishes he could fly
further than his tiny wings
can carry him.

2. New York, 1835

“Certainly they were like human beings,” writes The Sun, “for their wings had now disappeared and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified ... They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs from the top of the shoulders to the calves of their legs. The face, which was of a yellowish color, was an improvement upon that of the large orangutan... so much so that but for their long wings they would look as well on a parade ground as some of the old cockney militia.”

Reporter Richard A. Locke puts down the morning Sun
and contemplates his work:
Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made:
By Sir John Herschel, L.L.D. F.R.S. &c.
At the Cape of Good Hope
[From Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science]

That he had never spoken to the astronomer Herschel
was condensation on his morning teacup –
easily wiped away. That he had never seen
The Edinburgh Journal of Science
was little more.

t was enough to give his readers a world
more fantastic than the drudgery of 1835 –
The assassination attempt on President Jackson months old;
The U.S. debt at zero – and paper sales
not much more.

1835 had been dishwater dull, and still
the laborers toiled in the streets;
pushing carts, cobbling shoes.

Nothing to recommend
the tedium of 1835, until
he gave them golden temples
on the moon, until he gave them
men with the wings of bats
and tailless badgers who walked erect;

Mysteries and marvels, sober opium dream
at the other end of nonexistent telescopes.

Locke watches the papers fly
from the newsboys’ hands
and knows he’ll sleep easily,
that he would be the only one
not staring at the moon.

3. London, 1888

A man reads the morning papers
and marvels how they make a mockery of murder;

how they conjure fabrications –
that he’s a demon, or a Jew,
how he eats the flesh he carves,
how he wears a Leather Apron,
how he’s an actor in the theatrical version
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

As if it’s not enough that three whores are dead,
their bodies hacked and organs mutilated.

He quietly ponders this insufficiency, how it’s not
enough to be an honest monster, he must also
carve himself into their psyches, too –
he feels less, somehow. Insubstantial.

He is disappearing into other people’s fears –
intangible as moonlight.

That night, he slices
Catherine Eddows’s kidney from her body,
sends it to Scotland Yard, with a letter.

He addresses it “From Hell,”
signs it, “Catch me when you Can.”

He wonders, fleetingly,
“Is this monstrous enough?”

4. The Cape of Good Hope, 1835

John Herchel turns away from the stars
and spends some time in botany.

It’s a hobby, he knows – there are stars to catalog,
an endlessly unfolding array of nebulae.
There are moons, he suspects,
surrounding outer planets.

Another newspaperman accosted him
with questions of “Vespertilio-homo,”
of unicorns and bison on the moon,
of his thoughts on the golden temple,
of its repercussions.

“It’s repercussions,” he thinks, “is a mummer’s play,”
but he sighs, instead, and once again explains,
that he had written no such papers, that he, like everyone,
was a victim of the hoax.

The reporter frowned as though
Herchel had disproved the existence
of Father Christmas.

He’s long stopped caring, returning instead
to his illustrations of South African plants.

But in his solitude, he glances out the window
at the moon that falls alike
on Africa and New York City.
“So much beauty,” he thinks.
“Why can’t that be enough?”

5. London, 1888

The newspaper editor can read
upside-down and backward.

His gaze locks on the metal printing plates –
it has to be perfect, more frightening
than the other newspapers
competing for scarce pennies.
It has to be gaslight and spark,
for alleys where the moon
casts no glow.

The words will be truth once graven in metal. That’s all that matters.
“GHASTLY MURDER,” they say, in giant type, then smaller:
“Capture of Leather Apron.”

He walks away, and feels his age in his bones. Too old for hot-metal plates
too-old to start working mornings.

Absently, he remembers a headline from his boyhood:
“Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made”

It’s been fifty years, but he thinks about that story, sometimes,
how the moon is filled with monsters and bison,
living in harmony. He wonders what was inside
that temple. He wonders if man will ever
really see the moon. He’s afraid it might prove
a disappointment.

6. Virginia, 2011

Batboy makes his way to a late-night diner.
He knows the waitresses, they know
how he likes his coffee. They pay him
no mind. No one’s a monster
when you serve them every night.

He finds a booth near the window,
one where he can see the moon, shining
in the distance, like some knowable truth.

He’s prone to clairvoyance. The “Weekly”
has him call elections, pick the Final Four.
It doesn’t work like that – can’t do it on command –
but sometimes, when the moon is full,
He can see the shape of things to come.

Someone’s left a newspaper on the table,
and he flips past the war reports,
the stock exchange, the foreclosures and
the protests, flips until he finds
a tiny item, buried deep in international news.

A satellite, in disrepair, falling to Earth.
He reads the story and sighs. The moon
seems further away than ever.

Doesn’t matter, though. He knows the truth.
There are monsters on the moon.

Someday
Everyone will see.