The Ultimate Elsewhere
A short poem, written a quarter-century ago on an interstate highway overpass in Florida while watching John Glenn's return to space.
Twenty-five years ago this week, I was on an interstate highway in Orlando, Florida, 55 miles west of Cape Canaveral, when John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, went back beyond the clouds in Space Shuttle Discovery at age 77. I pulled over, got out of my rental car and — with a bunch of others who had parked their cars — I watched the tracer of the shuttle shoot into a clear blue sky.
THE GUYS from the state prison road gang
paused from retrieving litter
to look toward the skies.
The workers crafting Orlando’s
latest themed dream
clustered atop their unfinished handiwork
and cheered.
The family with the handheld TV
stood on the I-4 overpass
and ooh-ahhed
with a moon-shot-audience awe.
Even the swimsuited Wet ‘n Wild crowd,
just up International Drive
from the big plastic space shuttle that towers
over the Disney souvenir shop
near Denim World,
held up the water-slide line to take it all in
(if only for a station-identification moment),
as an old man from Ohio
who was once an optimistic nation’s
freshly minted hero
punched through stratosphere
on his journey back
to the one real elsewhere
that American know-how
has yet to package and sell.
—Orlando, Fla., 10-29-98
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