Matthew Campbell Roberts // Poetry

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Light Pollution

We were college freshmen,

the three of us laughing

swigging beer, driving dusty back roads

through a picket of lightless pines

with oldies cranking on the Falcon’s

AM radio outside of Pullman.

We had Joey’s astronomy professor’s telescope

the one not supposed to leave campus

that he supposedly borrowed

for his star chart project,

a half-dome looking thing

like the head of R2-D2.

I rode in the backseat with my arm around R2

holding her tight through the washboard

as we bopped and twisted

did the mash potato, and spilled beer

down my crotch like it was our last

dance at the grange sock hop.

I’m not sure what we thought

we’d see that night.

I only knew one of our headlights

peered off into tree tops

and the other disappeared into a zenith

dissolved by interstellar dust.

When we finally arrived at a clearing

(or the car stalled I don’t remember)

a place Joey said his dog was mauled

by a pack of wild coyotes, we mounted R2’s head

to the hood and pointed her one good eyeball

up at the waning gibbous moon.

None of us had ever seen anything like it,

the craters, the mountains—we were really there.

And for once in our drunken lives

we felt part of something

like we’d made our own lunar landing,

even found Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt,

and what we thought were the moons of Jupiter,

but turned out to be splotches of dried beer on the lens.

We believed more in ourselves that night

than anytime we’d ever known.

We were invincible beyond a doubt—

like the Columbia shuttle, you know.

Matthew Campbell Roberts was born in Napa Valley, California in 1971 where he attended a one-room schoolhouse set in the middle of a vineyard. After moving to Washington State he has worked a variety of jobs: deckhand on a purse seine, conservation laborer, stream steward, carpenter, fisheries technician, farm hand, bough cutter, baby’s breath picker in the desert-sage lands of eastern Washington, and later became a fly fishing guide on the Methow River and other waters near the eastern and western slopes of the North Cascades. He holds a BA in English literature and creative writing from Western Washington University where he was an editor of Jeopardy Magazine. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, but most recently in, Jeopardy, Prairie Poetry.Org, Windfall, Whatcom Places II anthology, The Methow Naturalist, and Tribute to Orpheus anthology, and has an interview with James Bertolino forthcoming in the Cortland Review.  He was a recipient of the 2006 Sue C. Boynton Poetry Award, 2006 Washington Wilderness Coalition’s “Words for Wilderness” prize, and the 2007 Jeanne Lohmann Prize for Poetry. In fall 2007 he will be teaching English composition while working toward an MFA in poetry at Eastern Washington University.

Date of Publication: 29 Oct 2007