Telescope

Got a call from my son, John,the other day. He had purchased a new telescope. We spoke about red dot finders and right angle scopes; Saturn, Jupiter, and the Andromeda Galaxy.

Yesterday Louise Gluck won the Nobel Prize in literature. VPR presented a piece where she read her poem: Telescope

There is a moment after you move your eye away

where you forget where you are

because you've been living, it seems, 

somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You've stopped being here in the world.

You're in a different place,

a place where human life has no meaning.

You're not a creature in body.

You exist as the stars exist,

participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you're in the world again.

At night, on a cold hill,

taking the telescope apart.

 

You realize afterward

not that the image is false

but the relation is false.

 

You see again how far away

every thing is from every other thing.