Night after night the astronomer
imagined the stars in their orbits,
building his orrery of glass and string;
he was making a kind of singing
that came from far beyond
himself, beyond the sounds
that human mouths will bring
into a form of being.
And then, one night,
it came to him
that the circles and spheres
had no meaning—that,
spinning, the globe’s center
might not return, ever,
to its point of beginning.
Instead a new circle
was entwined there and
another, and another—
until each was traversed
and described in its path.
It seemed to be the way the thread
a silkworm drops is thrown
around itself,
building a kind of house from
the weaving of so many
small orbits, drawn out
from the center on one side
and drawn in from the other,
producing an uneven motion,
alternately fast and lingering.
It was late, and reading
about the astronomer,
you thought grief could take
a shape like this. You thought
a loop, placed, then displacing,
could wind around and around
as each turn verged farther
from its start, plying its motion
without a given rhythm—all
things following from diminishment,
all things following a weighted
spin until you could not
bear to return to where
the loss, your loss, had been.
While you sat reading, late
into the night, someone was
setting a table, someone was
packing with slow precision.
The quiet metals—a fork, a spoon—
lay on the snowy cloth.
Someone turned down the sound
and it backed once more into silence.
Leaving your book, you came
into the room just as a door
in the distance was closing;
the surface of the table,
you realized, was still warm
from where a hand had been
resting. And you saw
how the room was like a clearing
in a forest; the brambles fell away
and the vault of sky appeared—the kind
of story you were told again
and again in the years before
you could read. You had half-
heard those words, like the thoughts
of someone sewing, or someone
compelled by bright flowers to
wander deeper
and deeper from
the road toward home.
You could not be more alone
in that place
that was the source
of all your forgetting.
And then you recalled how
the saint had said that
a body tends to follow
its own weight, its own weight
to its own place, not always
downward, not always toward
the earth, but to its own place
like fire rising upward.
If the lights of the heavens
were to cease, he said,
if the potter’s wheel continued
to be turning, all things would go
to their own place and the sun
and the moon and the stars,
as well, would follow the time
of returning to their places,
the time that no one yet knows.
You came into a room that turned into
a clearing and the clearing bore
outward like an eye. Oil beneath
water rises over water; fire on
the water is carried upward.
Things in their order seem to be
at rest, but are moving toward
their places with an inner fire
and weight. You thought you
were singing the song of the orrery,
where all things follow the motion
of light. But the stars are perfect;
we do not live among them.
We do not know them and
cannot know them; their music
steals the senses
and slows us into sleep.
You were moving with a purpose,
though you did not know it yet.
You were moving like a sleeper
through the shoals
of night. And that is how you
found this place; you cradled
one ear against the sky and put the other
against the ground. You chose your form
of leaning: you chose to stop and fall.