(for Alan Sandage, astronomer)
It was the best of all possible lives,
much spent lying night after black night
in the hard cold cradle on the mountain
under the 200”, gawping like a boy again –
the same boy with his ear to the telephone pole,
listening for the singing through the wires
of words in the wood – staring into the stars,
further and further out among the jewels of time.
The life of an eyeball. A life of measuring,
allowing angle, age, velocity and distance,
the black dusts, warps, city haze, and all of it
and with whatever else lies out beyond the faint
limit we can barely see where for us the lights
aren’t lit yet, on their long tether to infinity,
watching the far galaxies breathe into the plates.
It was an honourable life, a long tradition
fore and aft of those who wondered why
and what is all this stuff? It was a dreaming,
seeking a measure in the unforgiving distances –
crouched in my cold cage among the stars
from which we’re all of us made – and I was
part of that becoming, nothing endeavouring
to be something that could understand itself.
The rest was cold calculation: maps, papers,
surveys. I sought a constant, the ratio
of speed to mass that meant creation
thinned forever to grow dark and silent –
or collapsed and blew apart again,
the breathing out of breathing in,
a symmetry. There might be reason there,
if not a god of love a god of meaning.
At any rate that’s the scenario I go for.