The Explorer (Retold)

Book One: The Explorer
Part One: The Cave

A cave of life and equal fate,
we enter the dark door.
Books of miracles and unknown pains
echo heavenly calls.

We explore this old, dingy tomb
and analyze this place,
all its art and science runes
of all their cultural customs.

Their small moon sits atop the planet
like it was reeled down here.
It sits inside this worship set,
this giant cavethedral.

It's as if the moon had just phased
itself into our sights.
I scrawl down many words
as there comes a growing light.

Something or someone here still sings,
watching us inch our feet.
Friend or foe, subtle noise springs
and sharpens our dull senses.

We walk from room to room to room
and zoom our eyes around,
when a sudden shattering boom
comes piercing through our ears.

We spring on our spacesuit sight brights,
but this room gets brighter
then just my crew and I's commingled lights.
Not fear, but surprise courses

through our bodies like a new cure.
A new culture springs forth
as reptilian bipeds scur
around adorned in jeweled stones.

We watch them as they say something,
I think "who, what are you?"—
Forming around us in a big ring.
Confusion and misunderstanding
must be the first contact attempt, an inevitable
byproduct of languages lost to distance,
something we all must overcome.

We dim the brightness of our lights,
my crew and I alone
yet altogether in this benign,
obtuse and craggy cave.

Part Two: The Tour

After hours of contemplation
this newly discovered
species reveals their culture to us
and tours us around the cave.

Ancient infants waddle in their beds
far more spry and lively.
We observe that they're born like dead
then age into their youth.

They show us large halls of seat-crates,
sitting widely, dining.
They eat, laugh and commiserate
the troubles of their world
like us in our lost living rooms
where creatures cull and kill,
where mosquitoes fly into our homes
seeking live flesh and blood.

We travel miles through the cave seas
when I accidentally
let out a very loud, absurd sneeze.
Our guides, in horror, stare

as if they've witnessed a warring disease
or malicious locusts.
They stop their tour, grab me, my team
and fling us off the boat.

The waters boil through to our skins,
seeping through our spacesuit layers.
This cave is now a death dance den
as my crew and I sink

into these waters of grueling acid.
We sink and boil away;
a sneeze to them must be insipid
even behind the shoulder.

Death now greets us, pain coursing
through our bubbly song,
the water like a Trojan horse
that can do nothing wrong.

Part Three: On Foreign Shores

We awaken right next to corn
and two four-legged stags
with incredibly long, strong horns
like goliath trees.

I struggle to get to my feet
like the rest of my crew.
We get up, groggy and filthy,
and we recall the burning water.

Our spacesuits in ruined tatters,
glass incised into our eyes,
not that the scars ever matter
but we see now like kaleidoscopes.

The water that we faced burned.
Our flesh is stung, the heat
reddened our flesh, assured
our bodies are grist ghosts.

Inventions gone, melted away,
so no means to ring our orbital ship.
We sit by sea and farmland, astray,
unsure of what to do.

How are we still here and alive?
Why did they throw us out?
How did we live past Death's dance dive
from the burning water?

Did we have a just savior?
Are we ashore through luck?
The horned stags, did they swim before
and drag us back to shore?

Saviors come at the strangest times
like hanging from a cross,
bruised, bloodied, of ill health and mind
while our lives are at our lowest;

we sit inside our heads and think
of when our time will come,
when that hand of mute lonely things
will stretch its bolding light—

There is a melancholic shift
that now pervades our minds.
We held ourselves too high and wished
our minds give way to godhood,
when imperfect were our murals,
those twining folds within,
our brains are wet and greasy curls
that prolong aging skin.

Part Four: Benign Saviors

Beings conjured from here, the void
overtakes my crew's thoughts.
We witness as each humanoid
observes our tattered spacesuits.

By now we've accepted that we're dust
as they come along
and presumably rescue us
from the end we nearly sank into.

They sit us by a breathing fire
where smoke eclipses sky.
Certain they tell some mystic ires,
I watch and document;
they dance and spin like sand vials
and twist and turn around.
They look into our eyes and smile
and bring tears from our hearts.

As we watch them dance together
through the fire and the moon,
We feel safe from those we encountered
that threw us overboard.

It's a miracle that we're still alive,
I know it's not for nothing.
The beings offer their aid, strive
to make us feel welcomed.

We ask to leave and they allow,
they send the smoke skyward
allowing our ship to follow,
bringing us to our next journey.
We exchange the stories of our souls
as best as we possibly can,
giving ourselves made up roles
that we etch in shoreline sand.

Book Two: The Last Voyager
Part One: The Edgeless Abyss

The hours sweep by at light-speed
from one star to the next.
I etch a line in the ship's frame,
"We go among the distant wrecks."

There is joy and melancholy
that juxtaposes our
excitement, another voyage
here onboard this stellar tower.

No other voyage out will do,
they would demoralize
us and cause a ruptured wincing
mind as we're polarized.

The ship flies along a perilous path,
though we do not know it
yet as if the shapes of planets
distort our course and shift

us elsewhere on the way to Salite,
a planet orbiting
two stars amidst a chaos rend,
a tug-of-war with fate and rings.

Part Two: The Crash

A lightning clash of sky and land,
our ship is land and sky.
The flown up parts now fall and fall
slowly to the surface as we cry;
We've crashed upon an asteroid
with nowhere else to fly.
We dig ourselves from out the wreckage
and let out heaving sighs.

Smokeless, flameless, lifeless.
We flee our living, fleeing
from the steel that falls atop us,
siphoning our breathing.

Hope is all I have now tainted
by their suffocating.
Their bodies wilt and wither away
across this barren baring.

Their souls drift far from my sights.
They lie lifeless on the ground.
They're really dead this time, like lions
that roar with a scuffed sound.

I take my leave of the bodies
piled up and sanctified.
No ship can take me back to Earth,
in me they are immortalized.

They traveled farther, far like me
but their bodies gave out.
They leave themselves upon this rock
that I stand on and shout.

I shout to the heavens in rage,
I kick up dust and rubble,
yet still I feel no magic as thoughts
of my death ease my trouble.

The dragging, slogging time goes by,
no matter what I think,
the smiles leave as my mind mired
continues here to sink.

Part Three: A Lone Asteroid

Particles of rust paint my lips
dried deep down to my bones.
Days, weeks, I lost the count before
we crashed on one of many stones.

A king to no one but my thoughts
I scribble dates in dusty gray,
the brittle specks that bind this place
become the early start of May.

I sit by the ship's lifeless wreck
and watch the stars around,
the range of galaxies that move,
move mystically, unbound
by our eyes on normal planets
stuck in the same trite views.
Perhaps some god can sense my pain
and sent my eyes their muse.

The stars are like goliath beasts,
the ship is my cyclops.
It rusts and rears its head around
as ringing sounds now stop.

I live on in my aging mind.
Is that all Death really is,
Just us aging past the time
when we can share our myths?

Part Four: Salite

An atom broken below God,
the planet rises and drapes
itself over my head and swelling eyes.
I watch stargazed, mouth agape.

The fields of clouds obscure some parts
of the rising planet,
but I see its disheveled form
shatter small rocks and birds—

Salite—I note its distinct stretching
as two suns pull and tug—
its details strike my bewildered
mind. I struggle, yet stand up.

I can see the world we wanted
to find, to find a place
so distant from Earth that harbors
life and is nestled well,

a place where legends speak out words,
where power comes from knuth.
So quick do my emotions hit—
I feel irresolute.

I feel the working souls of space
cutting through my calloused flesh.
I feel no fear, no loss of life,
I'm ageless here,

I jump.

Part Five: The Time Warp

—The cataclysmic end arrives,
Genesis now reborn.
Sands fall across the starry skies,
stars collapse in on themselves—

I trudge the surface of Salite,
I wait for wanted death.
I see the Reaper's fealty eyes
eclipse my lonely dread.

—Vegetation acidifies,
abandoned lands crumble,
reality brings genocides
the scale of a Big Bang rumble.

I watch as stars fight like odds
in a grand sparring match.
Bets off, just the deaths of the gods
that walked our warring planets.

Incongruent realities
twist and turn and contort and amalgamate.
Ghostly races ionize and flee
their hunting hearts and minds.

The heads of humans atop mules,
cows tilling their own farms,
the price of elegant jewels
crash amidst the violent shift.

The waves of ice and fire mix
as heaven calls down the angels.
the ancient future's boldest trick?
the loss of all our minds and hearts.

Species that I'll never meet fly
inside my ailing heart,
worlds that I'll never see die
like ghosts with tattered wings.

The ground breaks and crumbles below,
elements tear apart,
a kaleidoscopic bellow
causes time to cease—NOW!

My life won't be ending right now,
as I lay and grasp at dirt.
this end made voluminous, loud,
does not kill my spirits.

I see some haze, my nose and eyes
give out and die today.
All my senses fade from me like
a long and longing escapade.

The last I think, I feel. My eyes close
and never see again.
My life and all its travels die
as memories meet my end.

It flashes back now through my mind
and comes together here,
the deeper me I longed to find
is the me to harness fear.

A cave of life and equal fate,
I enter the dark door—
It's done, the darkness now abates,
and I am where I was before.

Author's notes: I first wrote The Explorer after reading Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S. T. Coleridge and being inspired to write longer narrative poems. However, I also wanted to delve into science fiction settings for my narrative poems. I committed to writing The Explorer as a trilogy comprising three "books" as they called them in epics like Paradise Lost and The Odyssey. Those books were called "The Explorer", "The Survivor", and "The Last Voyager" (Aphelion issues 271, 272, and 273). While I was happy to have written it as my first "successful" foray into lengthy narrative poetry, upon seeing it online, I found myself reflecting on the lack of consistency within the poem. While I certainly took the phrase coined by Coleridge "suspension of disbelief" to heart, I feel that, in hindsight, too much of it left the poem's surrealist nature lacking in consistency and form.

This new edition features lengthy cuts to the original, and it centers the focus of the poem around the experiences of the Explorer. I've purposefully left the Explorer unnamed in order to give readers the chance to slot their own personhood into the role of said Explorer. The journey is, to a great extent, predestined; however, much of what occurs is open to interpretation. I don't think I'll ever be able to get this poem to the perfect vision I want it to be, but at the very least I can look at this retelling and remain happier with how it reads now.

Bio: Garrett Carroll is a poet and songwriter whose work has been published in Star*Line, Abyss & Apex, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, and Amethyst Press. He holds a B.A. in English/liberal arts from Adams State University and now calls North Dakota home. When he is not writing poetry, journaling, or playing music, he is daydreaming about all those things or wanting to cuddle with dogs.

Find more by Garrett Carroll in the Author Index.