To arrange and rearrange the seven olives
on the tabletop took hours, one can imagine,
for the man we have come to know as Galileo.
Seven, because Neptune had to be a star,
and Pluto was nothing more than a speck
in the imagination. On the tabletop,
the concentric circles of ink on paper were
punctuated by these seven olives. At the center,
a small orange to represent our Sun.
Because he was right in all things heliocentric,
Galileo was also wrong. The Earth may not have been
the center of the Universe but, as it turns out,
neither was our Sun. In the night sky
above Vermont, we did not need telescopes
to discern the Milky Way. It was simply there
for all to see: stars, stars, and more stars littering
the blue-black ink of the sky as if the Vedic myth
about a god spilling milk or, depending
on the translation, his semen, to create the heavens
were in fact truth. But truth is never easy, is it?
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we know
we are of this Earth. And standing in a field,
the chill of late August coming down, what did
any of us know about truth? We are poets and writers
who have devoted ourselves to fictions, to myth, to lies.
So when a young man in a fey black jacket said
that we were made of the very dust of the stars,
I laughed. The hardened scientist in me laughed.
Because even if there were some tiny grain
of truth in it, wouldn’t this young Galileo be only
partially right? There is, after all, poetry in
almost everything: the moth plunging into the sun
of a candle’s flame; the way dust seems to dance
within beams of light; the way the hunger in each
of us betrays the soul. All of it, so goddamned poetic.
Seven olives on a table in a small town in Italy, Galileo
watchful and intent on them, forcing himself to divine
the workings of the heavens: even that is poetic.
Seven planets and seven gods or goddesses
to steer them through the night sky. And what of this
poor student of physics, this even poorer student
of biochemistry? This student discovers years later
that in each and every one of us, there are seven grams
of silica, seven grams of dust that came from the stars.
It is never easy, the truth. It has never been easy.
Alone now and far from Vermont, there is no one
to utter platitudes or poetry to me in the dark.
And up above me, the sky is speckled with stars.
Do they call to us the way the ocean calls
to the saltwater within? I don’t know. It isn’t my job
to know. My job is to look, to look up. It is a job
our kind has had for all of our short-lived history.