Partially Right

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.