She contained innumerable bodies. For ages, she had swallowed our deceased
so neatly. With woven roots and grasses, she’d mended shut the million mouths
we’d cut and dug into her skin. She’d rebirthed our departed into night-blooming
jasmine, cats, avocado trees, snow, razor clams, and delicate blue moths. But hers

was the kind of body with which nothing elegant could be done: we couldn’t bury
Earth in herself. She was a corpse we carried on a titanium trailer bed twenty-five
thousand miles long, joined to a ship six times her size. We towed her as we flew
into the luminous, grieving nebulae. Clusters bowed and winked. Some stars split

apart with reverence. A few blue stragglers stretched to touch her, grazed her left
cheek, Egypt, and her right, Hawaii. They’d never glimpsed her up close and she
stunned, like a slightly faded screen goddess. But who suspected she possessed
secret technologies? After a while, she began to regenerate. Fresh forests leafed

out, like the astonishing eyelashes of Saint Bernadette of Lourdes who had been
posthumously displayed behind glass for centuries. Earth’s new foliage gave us
rashes. Her seas teemed with fishes of a species we had never known, all inedibly
emetic. To inhale her wildflower fumes would crimp the valves of our wondering

hearts. Before, so many of her features had existed only to delight, seduce, shelter
and nourish. She’d been our Mary, giving birth to God each day in a kaleidoscopic
array of forms. She’d been our Marilyn, soft, yielding, compliant, her please-just-
love-me smile bubbling in the ocean’s foamy edge, her blue eyes salty, trusting us

not to hurt her in all the ways we did. True, she’d sometimes terrified with her
wild Vesuvian moods, but now she refused to be of any actual use. She fluoresced
with toxic biologies, conceived gorgeous poisons and feathered deaths, so when
we entered her clear enclosure the very air was stinging, and violent with birds, yet

we couldn’t just unhitch her. We came from a race of collectors who had preserved
relics. Our forebears rummaged in junk shops for dented metal lunch pails, shopped
online for antique plates, torn Levi’s and lockets, kept photos beneath the clinging
plastic film of albums, cherished the victrola and the autograph, stored stiff dresses

in cedar. Nostalgia was our nature. So she was worth hauling, evocative as a Coke
can strung to the bumper of an old Chevrolet, rattling on asphalt as Adam and Eve
drive away. We told so many stories about how she used to be, we forgot the weight
of her ripening fury, and failed to predict our abandonment. Somewhere beyond

Andromeda she quaked herself free, rolled off into heaven. There were never any
umbilical cords that we could see. Yet even with all the food on the ship we grow
thin. Our mouths ache when we gaze out toward her, pale blue, already light years
away. And we pine. Our tongues hang for the old flavor of her atmosphere, her rain.