Back home, Vera slides photographic plates
under a microscope. She works on calculations
from the thousands of thin lines on the photographs
that stand for a galaxy.
Curving and flat lines show what stars are made of, their size,
temperature, and how far and fast they move.
Starlight moving closer to earth has shorter wavelengths,
shifts to the blue end of the spectrum.
Light that moves away shifts to the red end.
Like a telescope, math pulls in what’s grand,
pares in search of what’s crucial. She’s meticulous.
Minuscule errors matter the way a slight change
in the angle of a wrist can widely shift the arc of a ball struck
by a bat or hockey stick, or tossed into a hoop.
She measures spaces between the strips of colors
to calculate the speed of stars
and the distances between them,
looks for patterns between a star’s speed
and its distance from the galaxy’s center.
Each answer stirs new questions.