Astronaut School

He got a scholarship to astronaut school
and learned to cloak himself in stars,
to wear the clear darkness of eternity.
He learned to fall into nothingness,
to unexist, to roll
in the waters of time
like a spinning planet,
to sleep with the stars.
His girlfriend wondered vaguely
during a Tuesday evening phone
conversation what was so dissatisfying
about rolling hills of corn,
sugary city lights,
and macaroni sticking to the pot
that he needed so desperately
to lose himself in deep darkness.
She wondered if maybe it was really
all about dying.
Why bother with bottled oxygen
and fishbowl faces?
There is no need to eat
freeze-dried ice cream.
If you want nothingness,
she told him mentally,
if what you are searching for
is a cosmos of dark clarity,
do not seek it within
the fiery machinery of a spaceship.
you will never find it there.