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
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
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,