A Responsibility to Awe Read online

  REBECCA ELSON

  A Responsibility

  to Awe

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  POEMS

  We Astronomers

  The Expanding Universe

  When You Wish upon a Star

  Girl with a Balloon

  Explaining Relativity

  Let There Always Be Light

  Dark Matter

  Notte di San Giovanni

  The Last Animists

  Inventing Zero

  Theories of Everything

  Aberration

  Carnal Knowledge

  Constellations

  What if There Were No Moon?

  Observing

  Some Thoughts about the Ocean and the Universe

  Two Nuns, Lido Azzurro, September

  Olduvai Song Line

  Poem for my Father

  Devonian Days

  To Sarah’s Child

  Evolution

  Myth

  Frattura Vecchia

  February, rue Labat

  The Silk Road

  Arroyo

  Moth

  Salmon Running

  In Opposition

  After

  After Max Ernst

  Like Eels to the Sargasso Sea

  To the Fig Tree in the Garden

  Coming of Age in Foreign Lands

  Chess Game in a Garden

  Flying a Kite

  Family Reunion

  Futura Vecchia, New Year’s Eve

  Eating Bouillabaisse

  Radiology South

  Midwinter, Baffin Bay

  Yosemite Valley: Coyotes Running through a Sleeping Camp

  Returning to Camp

  Hanging out his Boxer Shorts to Dry

  Beauchamps: Renovations

  The Ballad of Just and While

  The Still Lives of Appliances

  OncoMouse, Kitchen Mouse

  These Two Candles, Saint Pantelehm

  Antidotes to Fear of Death

  EXTRACTS FROM THE NOTEBOOK

  FROM STONES TO STARS

  COPYRIGHT

  Poems

  We Astronomers

  We astronomers are nomads,

  Merchants, circus people,

  All the earth our tent.

  We are industrious.

  We breed enthusiasms,

  Honour our responsibility to awe.

  But the universe has moved a long way off.

  Sometimes, I confess,

  Starlight seems too sharp,

  And like the moon

  I bend my face to the ground,

  To the small patch where each foot falls,

  Before it falls,

  And I forget to ask questions,

  And only count things.

  The Expanding Universe

  How do they know, he is asking,

  He is seven, maybe,

  I am telling him how light

  Comes to us like water,

  Long red waves across the universe,

  Everything, all of us,

  Flying out from our origins.

  And he is listening

  As if I were not there,

  Then walking back

  Into the shadow of the chestnut,

  Collecting pink blossoms

  In his father’s empty shoe.

  When You Wish upon a Star

  When you wish upon a star,

  Remember the space walkers

  In their big boots,

  Floating between satellites

  And stations,

  Cracked dishes, broken wings,

  Kicking up a dust

  Of paint flecks,

  Loose parts.

  You in your dark field

  Looking up,

  Consider the fixed stars.

  You are the falling ones,

  Spending your wishes

  On a lost screw

  Losing height,

  Incandescent for an instant

  As thin air consumes it.

  Girl with a Balloon

  (Most of the helium in the universe was created in the Big Bang.)

  From this, the universe

  In its industrial age,

  With all the stars lit up

  Roaring, banging, spitting,

  Their black ash settling

  Into every form of life,

  You might look back with longing

  To the weightlessness, the elemental,

  Of the early years.

  As leaning out the window

  You might see a child

  Going down the road,

  A red balloon,

  A little bit of pure Big Bang,

  Bobbing at the end of her string.

  Explaining Relativity

  Forget the clatter of ballistics,

  The monologue of falling stones,

  The sharp vectors

  And the stiff numbered grids.

  It’s so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,

  Where space might cup itself around a planet

  Like your palm around a stone,

  Where you, yourself the planet,

  Caught up in some geodesic dream,

  Might wake to feel it enfold your weight

  And know there is, in fact, no falling.

  It is this, and the existence of limits.

  Let There Always Be Light

  (Searching for Dark Matter)

  For this we go out dark nights, searching

  For the dimmest stars,

  For signs of unseen things:

  To weigh us down.

  To stop the universe

  From rushing on and on

  Into its own beyond

  Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,

  Its last star going out.

  Whatever they turn out to be,

  Let there be swarms of them,

  Enough for immortality,

  Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

  Let there even be enough to bring it back

  From its own edges,

  To bring us all so close that we ignite

  The bright spark of resurrection.

  Dark Matter

  Above a pond,

  An unseen filament

  Of spider’s floss

  Suspends a slowly

  Spinning leaf.

  Notte di San Giovanni

  Under the giant fern of night

  Mosquitoes like asteroids

  Shining with sound

  In the untranslatable dark

  The Last Animists

  They say we have woken

  From a long night of magic,

  Of cravings,

  Fire for fire, earth for earth.

  A wind springs up.

  The birds stir in the dovecotes.

  It is so clear in this cold light

  That the firmament turns without music,

  That when the stars forge

  The atoms of our being

  No smith sweats in the labour.

  Day dawns.

  The chill of reason seeps

  Into the bones of matter

  But matter is unknowing.

  Mathematics sinks its perfect teeth

  Into the flesh of space

  But space is unfeeling.

  We say the dreams of night

  Are within us

  As blood within flesh

  As spirit within substance

  As the oneness of things

  As from a dust of pigeons

  The white light of wings.

  Inventing Zero

  First it was lines in the sand,

  The tangents, intersections,

  Things that ne
ver met,

  And you with your big stick,

  Calling it geometry,

  Then numbers, counting

  One and two, until

  A wind blew up

  And everything was gone,

  Blank to the horizon.

  Less than two for me

  But cunning you,

  You found a whole new

  Starting point:

  Let it have properties,

  And power

  To make things infinite,

  Or nothing,

  Or simply hold a space.

  Theories of Everything

  (Where the lecturer’s shirt matches the painting on the wall)

  He stands there speaking without love

  Of theories where, in the democracy

  Of this universe, or that,

  There could be legislators

  Who ordain trajectories for falling bodies,

  Where all things must be dreamed with indifference,

  And purpose is a momentary silhouette

  Backlit by a blue anthropic flash,

  A storm on some horizon.

  But even the painting on the wall behind,

  Itself an accident of shattered symmetries,

  Is only half eclipsed by his transparencies

  Of hierarchy and order,

  And the history of thought.

  And what he cannot see is this:

  Himself projected next to his projections

  Where the colours from the painting

  Have spilled onto his shirt,

  Their motion stilled into a rigorous

  Design of lines and light.

  Aberration

  The Hubble Space Telescope before repair.

  The way they tell it

  All the stars have wings

  The sky so full of wings

  There is no sky

  And just for a moment

  You forget

  The error and the crimped

  Paths of light

  And you see it

  The immense migration

  And you hear the rush

  The beating

  Carnal Knowledge

  Having picked the final datum

  From the universe

  And fixed it in its column,

  Named the causes of infinity,

  Performed the calculus

  Of the imaginary i, it seems

  The body aches

  To come too,

  To the light,

  Transmit the grace of gravity,

  Express in its own algebra

  The symmetries of awe and fear,

  The shudder up the spine,

  The knowing passing like a cool wind

  That leaves the nape hairs leaping.

  Constellations

  Imagine they were not minor gods

  Mounted in eternal in memoriam

  Or even animals, however savage,

  Pinned like specimens upon the sky.

  Imagine they were lambada dancers

  Practising their slow seductions

  On the manifolds of space.

  Then in the name of science

  We might ride their studded thighs

  To the edge of our hypotheses,

  Discover there the real constants

  Of the universe:

  The quick pulse,

  The long look,

  The one natural law.

  What if There Were No Moon?

  There would be no months

  A still sea

  No spring tides

  No bright nights

  Occultations of the stars

  No face

  No moon songs

  Terror of eclipse

  No place to stand

  And watch the Earth rise.

  Observing

  At the zenith of the night,

  Becalmed near sleep

  In your dark blind of dome,

  You hear it move.

  And looking up

  It’s there, so close

  You could reach

  And run your hand

  Across its belly

  Feel its vestigial heat,

  Its long, slow curves,

  Each bright nipple

  Where some planet sucks

  Some Thoughts about the Ocean and the Universe

  If the ocean is like the universe

  Then waves are stars.

  If space is like the ocean,

  Then matter is the waves,

  Dictating the rise and fall

  Of floating things.

  If being is like ocean

  We are waves,

  Swelling, travelling, breaking

  On some shore.

  If ocean is like universe then waves

  Are the dark wells of gravity

  Where stars will grow.

  All waves run shorewards

  But there is no centre to the ocean

  Where they all arise.

  Two Nuns, Lido Azzurro, September

  This is the season when the nuns

  Come down to walk along the beach,

  In pairs, like rare white wading birds,

  Their wimples whipping in the wind.

  Only their shoes shed,

  They hoist their habits

  Up above their knees

  And walk into the waves.

  But if God is this turquoise jewel of sea,

  Wouldn’t he want to take them in unwrapped?

  Let them feel the lightness of their limbs,

  Their buoyant breasts?

  Olduvai Song Line

  Here our ancestors are sung

  Through labouring lips,

  A tunnel of loins, stretching

  Hot and long to this dry gorge

  Where some are rising still

  To score the surface

  With their bones.

  Poem for my Father

  That was the story of your life:

  Three older sisters

  Stuffing handkerchiefs into your mouth

  To shut you up,

  Two fickle daughters,

  One cross wife,

  Blaming you for scandals in Parliament,

  For snowstorms in May.

  You kept so quiet all those years,

  Tracing the earth’s scarps and varves,

  And shifting shores,

  Calculating the millennia of waves

  Rolling the bleached pebbles round,

  Knuckle bones of a fossil sea.

  If I could have been a son, I was,

  Understanding beach as you did:

  Prairie grasses lapping at a ridge of gravel,

  Sand dunes in a sea of spruce,

  Following you down a strand line,

  On across a dry bed,

  Like the first hominids,

  Our footprints trailing out behind,

  You honouring all my questions

  With your own.

  Devonian Days

  That was the week it rained

  As if the world thought it could begin again

  In all the innocence of mud,

  And we just stayed there

  By the window, watching,

  So aloof from our amphibious desires

  That we didn’t recognise

  The heaviness we took to be

  Dissatisfaction with the weather

  To be, in fact, the memory

  After buoyancy, of weight,

  Of belly scraping over beach.

  We didn’t notice, in our restlessness,

  The webbed toes twitching in our socks,

  The itch of evolution,

  Or its possibilities.

  To Sarah’s Child

  … I heard the heartbeat today. It sounded like someone hammering beside the sea …

  When you come to us

  From where you have been working,

  There, in the sand,

  By the warm, slow waves,

  M
ay we have the wisdom to receive

  The ornament or tool

  That you were making,

  That she heard you hammering

  That afternoon.

  Evolution

  We are survivors of immeasurable events,

  Flung upon some reach of land,

  Small, wet miracles without instructions,

  Only the imperative of change.

  Myth

  What I want is a mythology so huge

  That settling on its grassy bank

  (Which may at first seem ordinary)

  You catch sight of the frog, the stone,

  The dead minnow jewelled with flies,

  And remember all at once

  The things you had forgotten to imagine.

  Frattura Vecchia

  Breaking bread beside the spring,

  Yourself mute

  And the village going to the mountain

  Stone by stone,

  A snake moves towards the water,

  Mythical, precise, remote,

  And you are taken by a sudden temporality,

  Like water from a dry hill –

  Each bit of landscape

  A piece from somewhere else

  Till, lying on your back

  There is no mountain,