February 21, 2012

The sky is again gray and flat and close, nothing mars its sameness, the distant light, come all this way from the sun, is dulled and faded by a film of water we can't live without.  Necessary, but it makes a morning without sun, soft light, not even any shadows, everything tentative and delicately resting, damp and chill.  The cat slinks its way across the yard and under the shed, hunting something or merely practicing.
  
This morning the poem has to do with an expanding universe, and I will include this wonderful photo by Mikko Lagerstedt that was posted on Tumblr in devidsketchbook.

Life in an Expanding Universe

It’s not only all those
cosmic pinwheels with their charging solar
luminosities, the way they spin around
like the paper kind tacked to a tree trunk,
the way they expel matter and light
like fields of dandelions throwing off
waves of summer sparks in the wind,
the way they speed outward,
receding, creating new distances
simply by soaring into them.

But it's also how the noisy
crow enlarges the territory
above the landscape at dawn, making
new multiple canyon spires in the sky
by the sharp towers and ledges
of its calling; and how the bighorn
expand the alpine meadows by repeating
inside their watching eyes every foil
of columbine and bell rue, all
the stretches of sedges, the candescences
of jagged slopes and crevices existing there.

And though there isn't a method
to measure it yet, by finding
a golden-banded skipper on a buttonbush,
by seeing a blue whiptail streak
through desert scrub, by looking up
one night and imagining the fleeing
motions of the stars themselves, I know
my presence must swell one flutter-width
wider, accelerate one lizard-slip farther,
descend many stellar-fathoms deeper
than it ever was before.

Pattiann Rogers

It's the perfect poem because I can hear the crows calling in their rough voices, not conversational this morning, but calling to each other like long lost friends, wanting to get together and get up to some mischief.  Cardinals and blue jays have turned up in the yard, and everywhere the sound of lawn mowers, like big hearts turning and turning, row on row, make every inch of green into another growling beat.  You can smell the onions and the almost suffocating green scent of new grass.

I think I like pictures of crowded night skies because here we get so little of  night sky.  It has to be really dry and clear to see any but the brightest stars because we live surrounded by lights of all kinds, from the plants, and the port, and the boardwalk with its rides and neon.  It's sometimes photographs that give me the "many stellar-fathoms deeper" feeling for lots of different things, so many absolutely gorgeous photos in the world, but especially photos of the night sky, views I envy and seem to crave!

Even though I can't see it, I know our star is throwing off its dandelion sparks of light that mean life for us.  And at night we are visited by light from other centuries, from places that have moved on, from so far away we have to take pictures of it to save it to savor.


Mikko Lagerstedt  Black Swan September 2011