Arcturus setting last night, over the roof of the garage; the Sickle sweeping endlessly backwards; a mist rising from the streets. Vega so directly overhead that looking up at her, and turning to orient myself to the Summer Triangle, gave me vertigo. The desire for something afar / from the sphere of our sorrow.
All the things that tumble up out of the ground, or out of strollers, and take their improbable places as earthly powers, for a little bit, before they tumble down again.
Leaves going yellow. There will be floods and blockages where there were fires: detritus coming down the rivers, muddy water in the streets. But above the dirty clouds and the ruined air there are still stars.
Every morning I lie on my little Persian carpet on the concrete floor, and lay my hands on my ribs, which are gradually rising, like the basalt circles on the beach when a rough winter comes and the sand is washing away. Like that.
Ribs and hands, sets of little bones in parallel, go instinctively to each other, and play little mathematical games. With five and twelve you can do anything, anything at all.
Showing posts with label Stars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stars. Show all posts
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Saturday, December 26, 2015
Morning Walk
A glorious walk this morning, the full moon lighting a sheath of cloud as it fell westwards, Venus rising huge and strangely yellow in the east, and Jupiter due south. I had to stop and stare at Venus a while. There must have been a haze eastwards: Venus is usually pure brilliant white, tending to blue, if anything; but she was as yellow as Jupiter this morning. The whole sky was a patchwork of cloud and clear, and the moon shifted the shades of everything, as she will: it took me a long time to get fully oriented. I knew nothing but Venus could be so bright as that fabulous orb in the southeast, and anyway I could already see Jupiter, high up on the ecliptic, but I wondered for a while if it was some sky-ship, or a mirage, or something. Or possibly I had walked away and slid unbeknownst into another sky, with new planets. I imagine sometimes the giddiness of seeing the southern stars for the first time: the most fundamental of disorientations. I hope I do see them, someday, and my world will yaw like a little boat on the sea.
Walking home, northwards now, I saw that Vega was already well up over the horizon. She keeps appearing, these days, at odd times: when I was younger I only saw her in the summertime, but this year I was seeing her late into the Fall in the early evening, and now I glimpse her in the morning. Maybe I only looked for her in the summer, before. She did not signify so much in those days. Now I'm always looking for a sign that the blessing has left me. But the blessing never does: I don't understand it.
One special instance: I was on the far side of the West Hills, in the late Fall, getting my gear out the car, and one small pool of sky opened in the cloud cover, and there was Vega, just opening her wings to light on the Coast Range. Such things don't bear much handling, of course, but you can't ignore them either.
Walking home, northwards now, I saw that Vega was already well up over the horizon. She keeps appearing, these days, at odd times: when I was younger I only saw her in the summertime, but this year I was seeing her late into the Fall in the early evening, and now I glimpse her in the morning. Maybe I only looked for her in the summer, before. She did not signify so much in those days. Now I'm always looking for a sign that the blessing has left me. But the blessing never does: I don't understand it.
One special instance: I was on the far side of the West Hills, in the late Fall, getting my gear out the car, and one small pool of sky opened in the cloud cover, and there was Vega, just opening her wings to light on the Coast Range. Such things don't bear much handling, of course, but you can't ignore them either.
Monday, November 30, 2015
Invincible Summer
You can still see Vega
over the garage roof,
even in early December,
when the Winter King
is laboring up the eastern sky,
leaning on his stick,
and cursing the housetops;
and though Orion shakes
his shaggy wondering head,
after his long summer blindness.
She's still there, and the writ of her blessing still runs.
And beyond, beyond,
is the white lob of the Moon,
drawing kiltered squares
through all the blanched windows of the world:
here and across the mountains,
where the road outruns its colors,
and a pale face is turned to the pale sky.
over the garage roof,
even in early December,
when the Winter King
is laboring up the eastern sky,
leaning on his stick,
and cursing the housetops;
and though Orion shakes
his shaggy wondering head,
after his long summer blindness.
She's still there, and the writ of her blessing still runs.
And beyond, beyond,
is the white lob of the Moon,
drawing kiltered squares
through all the blanched windows of the world:
here and across the mountains,
where the road outruns its colors,
and a pale face is turned to the pale sky.
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
Older and Wilder
I love the short winter days and the long, nuanced nights: I love getting up in dark, and picking my way to our little sun room, to squint up at the clouds packing themselves around the moon, or at the few stray stars vanishing westward. Sun is all very well, but a little goes a long way with me.
It's partly because I love this time of year, the long dream time, that I resent the holidays so much: all that aggressive, brassy cheer, all the noise and glare, which the perpetrators themselves confess is the expression of their own fear of the quiet and the dark. I like the quiet and the dark. I don't need the sun's company first thing in the morning every day. I can find my way about the house by feel, or the odd reflection of moon or streetlight, slantwise through beveled glass. It perplexes me that the same people who love being up late at night -- when, in case you hadn't noticed, it is also cold and dark -- make such a fuss about the cold dark winter mornings. It's supposed to be cold and dark. It's January. The earth has tilted this way for a long time.
I love walking, morning or evening, in the dark, with the towers of cloud swaying over my head, and slowly tumbling down to the horizon line. The glimpsed stars, marking the wheeling heaven. Not the boasting sun, which blots everything else out and pretends to be walking alone. The night sky obviously wheels in concert, every star inset in some larger movement. The sun encourages us to believe in its agency, but the night sky invites us to acknowledge that it is we who are moving, we who are whirling around and around and around. Everything seems to be falling down the slippery west of heaven, until you see it, actually see that it's the horizon climbing. Once seen, never forgotten.
Or you can crouch inside your house with all the lights on, and your garish lighted Christmas tree, and pretend your little human story is the fixed center of the universe. But it's still out there, the stars and the surging horizon. It's all far older and wilder than we are.
It's partly because I love this time of year, the long dream time, that I resent the holidays so much: all that aggressive, brassy cheer, all the noise and glare, which the perpetrators themselves confess is the expression of their own fear of the quiet and the dark. I like the quiet and the dark. I don't need the sun's company first thing in the morning every day. I can find my way about the house by feel, or the odd reflection of moon or streetlight, slantwise through beveled glass. It perplexes me that the same people who love being up late at night -- when, in case you hadn't noticed, it is also cold and dark -- make such a fuss about the cold dark winter mornings. It's supposed to be cold and dark. It's January. The earth has tilted this way for a long time.
I love walking, morning or evening, in the dark, with the towers of cloud swaying over my head, and slowly tumbling down to the horizon line. The glimpsed stars, marking the wheeling heaven. Not the boasting sun, which blots everything else out and pretends to be walking alone. The night sky obviously wheels in concert, every star inset in some larger movement. The sun encourages us to believe in its agency, but the night sky invites us to acknowledge that it is we who are moving, we who are whirling around and around and around. Everything seems to be falling down the slippery west of heaven, until you see it, actually see that it's the horizon climbing. Once seen, never forgotten.
Or you can crouch inside your house with all the lights on, and your garish lighted Christmas tree, and pretend your little human story is the fixed center of the universe. But it's still out there, the stars and the surging horizon. It's all far older and wilder than we are.
Sunday, November 30, 2014
The Year, Wheeling
When I got home from my evening massage last night, Vega was setting, and Orion just rising in the east.
At four this morning, I woke, and realized I'd left my pack in the car. I slipped out of bed and walked out in my bare feet, on the frozen cement, to fetch it: I wanted to recharge my laptop before morning. My eye followed the handle of the Dipper, of its own accord, and extended its widening curve, falling toward the eastern horizon: and there was Arcturus -- my first reminder, this year, that winter eventually turns into spring. The year plays out in little, every night.
(This photo is credited to Stellarium, and edited, if I'm reading right, by one Bob King. It's labelled 10 p.m. in March: well, yes, but it's also 4 a.m. in late November, if you happen to be prowling about at that time of morning. The year wheels over your head as you sleep.)
I'm never sure how much people know about the sky. I was startled last year by discovering that lots of people, perfectly clever and informed people, had no notion of the ecliptic: they had never learned, and never observed, that sun, moon, and planets can only appear in one swath of the sky. I absorbed this with some consternation. Were these people who could see a full moon appear on the northern horizon -- or even the sun -- with equanimity? Would they notice at least a certain strangeness? I wasn't sure. The disquiet has never left me. Because of course I am walking about in multiple inexplicable ignorances, quite as obvious to people who have a good high school grasp of, say, chemistry, or classical music. The fact that, after all these years, I still don't know what sort of stuff potassium is, or what instrument makes that hollow moo, is pathetic. Do I pay no attention at all?
At four this morning, I woke, and realized I'd left my pack in the car. I slipped out of bed and walked out in my bare feet, on the frozen cement, to fetch it: I wanted to recharge my laptop before morning. My eye followed the handle of the Dipper, of its own accord, and extended its widening curve, falling toward the eastern horizon: and there was Arcturus -- my first reminder, this year, that winter eventually turns into spring. The year plays out in little, every night.
(This photo is credited to Stellarium, and edited, if I'm reading right, by one Bob King. It's labelled 10 p.m. in March: well, yes, but it's also 4 a.m. in late November, if you happen to be prowling about at that time of morning. The year wheels over your head as you sleep.)
I'm never sure how much people know about the sky. I was startled last year by discovering that lots of people, perfectly clever and informed people, had no notion of the ecliptic: they had never learned, and never observed, that sun, moon, and planets can only appear in one swath of the sky. I absorbed this with some consternation. Were these people who could see a full moon appear on the northern horizon -- or even the sun -- with equanimity? Would they notice at least a certain strangeness? I wasn't sure. The disquiet has never left me. Because of course I am walking about in multiple inexplicable ignorances, quite as obvious to people who have a good high school grasp of, say, chemistry, or classical music. The fact that, after all these years, I still don't know what sort of stuff potassium is, or what instrument makes that hollow moo, is pathetic. Do I pay no attention at all?
Saturday, November 08, 2014
Vega
The courage to slow down, to take things one at a time, to take a full breath, from beginning to end, without my attention flickering to someone, somewhere, who might approve of me. (Because of course the worst thing in the world, would be to miss a morsel of approval.)
It's been an odd schooling, but an effective one. No one's approval particularly means anything: it's all contingent, unsteady, unpredictable. Steering by it would be disaster. Yet that's what I've been doing. Despite the obvious, which I should know and do know: people approve of you because of what they need, not because of what you need. It's a hard, bitter world, in some ways, and we're all scrabbling at the bottom of a barrel in the dark.
Sometimes you hold on to my hand as though I were life itself. And I simply stop, and hold in return. What else are we here for? It's not as if there was anything to say.
Still, though, if it doesn't drive me, it still moves me, it's such a thrusting habit of mind: "maybe this means I'm special! Maybe I've found it!" Even though I know perfectly well that to be special is to be bound and helpless, a hostage to my imagination. If I want to be free, I had better not want to be special. You don't get both.
And I do want to be free. Even a hint, the glint of Vega over a dark housetop, the wind stirring my hair as I step wearily out of my car, and turn to haul my table out of the back seat -- even those quiet messengers -- my heart rises to meet them, not with a feverish urgency, but with the hinted memory of a long-forgotten ease. Those messengers are the ones to welcome: those are the friends that will bring me home.
It's been an odd schooling, but an effective one. No one's approval particularly means anything: it's all contingent, unsteady, unpredictable. Steering by it would be disaster. Yet that's what I've been doing. Despite the obvious, which I should know and do know: people approve of you because of what they need, not because of what you need. It's a hard, bitter world, in some ways, and we're all scrabbling at the bottom of a barrel in the dark.
Sometimes you hold on to my hand as though I were life itself. And I simply stop, and hold in return. What else are we here for? It's not as if there was anything to say.
Still, though, if it doesn't drive me, it still moves me, it's such a thrusting habit of mind: "maybe this means I'm special! Maybe I've found it!" Even though I know perfectly well that to be special is to be bound and helpless, a hostage to my imagination. If I want to be free, I had better not want to be special. You don't get both.
And I do want to be free. Even a hint, the glint of Vega over a dark housetop, the wind stirring my hair as I step wearily out of my car, and turn to haul my table out of the back seat -- even those quiet messengers -- my heart rises to meet them, not with a feverish urgency, but with the hinted memory of a long-forgotten ease. Those messengers are the ones to welcome: those are the friends that will bring me home.
Friday, August 01, 2014
Apparent Motion
And embarrassing how often I find I have driven entirely off the rails, no longer moving at all, my eyes still flicking to some ancient jerking cartoon song, and I, I, alone and as lost as ever. I never knew what I was doing. How the sky wheels overhead! a waxing crescent moon setting, meaning it has been haunting the sky unseen all day. I have heard people, grown human beings with real jobs, wondering where the moon has gone that they glimpsed in the west at evening. They think because it's new it should be rising, I guess. I don't even have the heart to tell them.
The earth, the earth is round like a ball, or like a shoulder, or like a smoothed pebble, and as I turn it -- thus -- the moon (the which we figure as this fingertip of chalk) appeareth to rise and set. And so the sun too appeareth to rise and set, but all this is the spinning of this lovely blue and white roundness, and all the things that show shining in the west, all of them, are dropping from our sight.
The moon sure seems a little slower than the others: because it really is travelling, right around us, going to the East: not so fast as we are spinning, not near so fast, but fast enough -- it keeps up enough -- to seem to lag behind the stars, a handsbreadth maybe per night. It is not lagging; rather, it is falling behind our spin more slowly than the stars, if you like to look at it that way. If you like to look at it at all. Do you like to look at it? Do you like to imagine that it's real? Do that, sometimes: because it is real.
I too am real, a real animal, even if I am an untracked train car, a sometime wreck. My chest rises and falls some twelve times a minute, and my heart beats some five times per breath, falling behind, maybe, like the moon against the stars, or else -- you can always lay the string end to end the other way -- catching up with the unmoving flesh. And my eyes blink. You can tell I'm alive, no matter how still I hold myself: how the blood kicks with each squeeze of the heart! And that's not even to mention all the gurgling and fermenting in my midsection, more the work of my resident bacteria than of mine, sure, but still ordered and marshalled and delimited by my digestive tract -- yards and yards of smooth muscle, doing its work with no more than a casual nod to the voluntary motor system in passing.
Now -- to the purpose of our rather speech -- supposing other people to be fixed -- they are not, I know, but suppose -- then my heart might be said to advance a handsbreadth, every day, though it appears to lag. So if you see it shining in the west, don't look for it later on at night. It will have dropped from your sight: it has been in the sky all day, but you've been too blind, my dear, too blind to see it. It is only an ocean of potassium and sodium, after all, washing against calcium shores. How I love you, and miss you!
So I set one wheel after another onto the rails, heaving her up, under the stars. No, no, no moon tonight! You haven't listened to a word I've said, have you?
Rally and heave, heave O! we sing. Round and round and round she goes, back on the track and away she rolls!
The earth, the earth is round like a ball, or like a shoulder, or like a smoothed pebble, and as I turn it -- thus -- the moon (the which we figure as this fingertip of chalk) appeareth to rise and set. And so the sun too appeareth to rise and set, but all this is the spinning of this lovely blue and white roundness, and all the things that show shining in the west, all of them, are dropping from our sight.
The moon sure seems a little slower than the others: because it really is travelling, right around us, going to the East: not so fast as we are spinning, not near so fast, but fast enough -- it keeps up enough -- to seem to lag behind the stars, a handsbreadth maybe per night. It is not lagging; rather, it is falling behind our spin more slowly than the stars, if you like to look at it that way. If you like to look at it at all. Do you like to look at it? Do you like to imagine that it's real? Do that, sometimes: because it is real.
I too am real, a real animal, even if I am an untracked train car, a sometime wreck. My chest rises and falls some twelve times a minute, and my heart beats some five times per breath, falling behind, maybe, like the moon against the stars, or else -- you can always lay the string end to end the other way -- catching up with the unmoving flesh. And my eyes blink. You can tell I'm alive, no matter how still I hold myself: how the blood kicks with each squeeze of the heart! And that's not even to mention all the gurgling and fermenting in my midsection, more the work of my resident bacteria than of mine, sure, but still ordered and marshalled and delimited by my digestive tract -- yards and yards of smooth muscle, doing its work with no more than a casual nod to the voluntary motor system in passing.
Now -- to the purpose of our rather speech -- supposing other people to be fixed -- they are not, I know, but suppose -- then my heart might be said to advance a handsbreadth, every day, though it appears to lag. So if you see it shining in the west, don't look for it later on at night. It will have dropped from your sight: it has been in the sky all day, but you've been too blind, my dear, too blind to see it. It is only an ocean of potassium and sodium, after all, washing against calcium shores. How I love you, and miss you!
So I set one wheel after another onto the rails, heaving her up, under the stars. No, no, no moon tonight! You haven't listened to a word I've said, have you?
Rally and heave, heave O! we sing. Round and round and round she goes, back on the track and away she rolls!
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Pleiades
I wanted to lift the haunted water
to that faint shield, no bigger
than a man's hand,
of the Pleiades.
I found a photo of you, as a girl,
scowling at the camera,
at the future, at me:
you were trying to see
through
the lens, that scissor of darkness.
I reached out fingertips to brush your cheek
but you were wilder then
even than now;
you vanished with your sisters
at a thickening of the cloud.
to that faint shield, no bigger
than a man's hand,
of the Pleiades.
I found a photo of you, as a girl,
scowling at the camera,
at the future, at me:
you were trying to see
through
the lens, that scissor of darkness.
I reached out fingertips to brush your cheek
but you were wilder then
even than now;
you vanished with your sisters
at a thickening of the cloud.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Blessings beyond their Writ
Careful now, careful dear...
None of this is going to change anything.
Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man
Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.
Grateful, grateful for Neva, grateful for the violent rain. Grateful for a book arriving on my doorstep, while I was reading a library copy of it:
Grateful for blessings that run far beyond their writ: for the stormy skies clearing long enough for Vega to appear, and to lance me under the collarbone, cold and blue as shadowed ice. "You are still blessed," she told me sternly. As much as to say, "don't get any ideas about slipping out the back door, bucko."
None of this is going to change anything.
Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man
Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.
Grateful, grateful for Neva, grateful for the violent rain. Grateful for a book arriving on my doorstep, while I was reading a library copy of it:
Grateful for blessings that run far beyond their writ: for the stormy skies clearing long enough for Vega to appear, and to lance me under the collarbone, cold and blue as shadowed ice. "You are still blessed," she told me sternly. As much as to say, "don't get any ideas about slipping out the back door, bucko."
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Aquarius
He is large, clumsy, inarticulate:
and he carries a shallow pan filled with white,
or cream, or light, or wincing happiness.
It slops, as he hurks and hesitates
his way across the stibbled ecliptic,
poor man! A reluctant king, who limps
up to his ankles in freezing cloud,
as anxious to please and sure to fail
as Maximilian of Mexico.
This is the awkward dawn of an age
writ in the stars with dry-erase; this,
the white-board of heaven, where
a mortal's brainstorm is a bullet point
scrawled each in its personal faded color.
Cast your eyes up to the dribbling pan
of our distressed and twitching lord:
this is the spill of compassion;
this is the splash of eternity.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Enough Rope
Wooden soldier, wooden sword,
Chocolate coins in crinkled gold
Hints of something bought and sold,
Hints of murder in the stars.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “Advent Calendar”
Quickly I've come to love the low, growly form of Mt Tabor against the western sky, when I walk down from our little ridge to the 82nd Avenue Safeway to buy milk. The main hump is mama bear: just beyond her sleeping nose is the smaller hump of the baby bear. His tail wanders northward, along about 70th Avenue, making a little hump for the commuting cyclist to climb over. The baby bear's tail, and the ridge of 84th Avenue, don't exist on the geological survey map. But they exist to a bicyclist, or to a shopper going on foot. At twilight Venus glows above mama, and the baby's tail points at his celestial counterpart, Ursa Minor, circling his own cruelly staked tail over the unseen river to the north.
Patiently, day after day, I pick apart the strands of the rope. As Martha Grimes noted, it's always easy to find reasons to hate, when you have the will to do it. I don't like to hate. All precepts and commandments aside, it's like having a fever or an intestinal complaint. What I don't really know is whether there's a core under all these fibers, something that needs to be fixed or addressed. Maybe it's just hatred all the way down. I come to the slam-dunk reason to hate, the one clear treacherous dishonesty, and – satisfying though that momentarily is – with it comes the certainty that this reason, this rational and justifiable reason, has actually nothing to do with the blaze: I'd have to rewrite the whole history of the injury in order to pretend it did. No, I think all I ever hated anyone for was not loving and admiring me. That's the only unforgivable sin: that's the rope, the twist, and every fiber.
“Saint Valentine's is past,” observes Theseus, pausing by the tangled, sleeping lovers. “begin these wood-birds but to couple now?”
Chocolate coins in crinkled gold
Hints of something bought and sold,
Hints of murder in the stars.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg, “Advent Calendar”
Quickly I've come to love the low, growly form of Mt Tabor against the western sky, when I walk down from our little ridge to the 82nd Avenue Safeway to buy milk. The main hump is mama bear: just beyond her sleeping nose is the smaller hump of the baby bear. His tail wanders northward, along about 70th Avenue, making a little hump for the commuting cyclist to climb over. The baby bear's tail, and the ridge of 84th Avenue, don't exist on the geological survey map. But they exist to a bicyclist, or to a shopper going on foot. At twilight Venus glows above mama, and the baby's tail points at his celestial counterpart, Ursa Minor, circling his own cruelly staked tail over the unseen river to the north.
Patiently, day after day, I pick apart the strands of the rope. As Martha Grimes noted, it's always easy to find reasons to hate, when you have the will to do it. I don't like to hate. All precepts and commandments aside, it's like having a fever or an intestinal complaint. What I don't really know is whether there's a core under all these fibers, something that needs to be fixed or addressed. Maybe it's just hatred all the way down. I come to the slam-dunk reason to hate, the one clear treacherous dishonesty, and – satisfying though that momentarily is – with it comes the certainty that this reason, this rational and justifiable reason, has actually nothing to do with the blaze: I'd have to rewrite the whole history of the injury in order to pretend it did. No, I think all I ever hated anyone for was not loving and admiring me. That's the only unforgivable sin: that's the rope, the twist, and every fiber.
“Saint Valentine's is past,” observes Theseus, pausing by the tangled, sleeping lovers. “begin these wood-birds but to couple now?”
Friday, January 20, 2012
Homage to William Blake
I spend a lot of time kneading oiled flesh, which means my hands are strong but soft. This is sometimes a bad combination. A day or two ago, after washing the dishes, I dragged the surprisingly hard crusted snow off my car's windshield with my soggy-skinned hands. Wasn't till I was driving that I noticed I had torn scraps of skin off from between my fingers. Ouch.
(I'm healed up now, in time for my weekend appointments. I heal like a young dog, fortunately.)
Roof
Los by starlight –
he lets his hammer fall
and it slides slowly down the ice,
its haft curling round its head; it moves
down the slant, the second hand
of an unfixed, unfixable clock, to skid
silently over eave and gutter, to write
self erasing circles in the space
above the snow. It falls
without a sound.
Much as I admire William Blake, I have to say that he was utterly and completely wrong about stars.
(I'm healed up now, in time for my weekend appointments. I heal like a young dog, fortunately.)
Roof
Los by starlight –
he lets his hammer fall
and it slides slowly down the ice,
its haft curling round its head; it moves
down the slant, the second hand
of an unfixed, unfixable clock, to skid
silently over eave and gutter, to write
self erasing circles in the space
above the snow. It falls
without a sound.
Much as I admire William Blake, I have to say that he was utterly and completely wrong about stars.
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