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If you fix the earth at the center
And watch the solar system run around it,
Gyre upon gyre, wheel within wheel
Moved without mechanism, as an unseen hand
Draws them again, again!, from above,
Or an unseen heart draws them from within
Toward the terrible mystery of that blue star,
And an unknown fear turns them always aside;
‘Planetes,’ wanderers, Aristotle’s angels:
Towards, and away, and towards again,
And ever around; imprinting, in cycles of time,
Upon the empty pages of space,
Flowers that never fade, never die—
You can glimpse in these arabesques,
Patterned, ornate, the vaulting mosque of the stars,
Not dignified, quite, by the figures of men,
But still, in their music, a call to prayer. Copernicus did not make the sun the center;
He allowed us to place it wherever we like:
In the empty grave, perhaps,
At the edge of this rolling planet,
Around which we, too, like a weighted
One-sided ball, make our bend—
If these epicycles are ugly in the mathematics
Of the spheres, they are ornamentation
In the act;
We need not live under the Bauhaus heaven
Of bare concentric circles:
There is a beauty in the brutalism
Of our astronomy, so long as it does not desecrate
The altar of the stars. Only the fool
Thinks he knows the opera of the world
For having read the libretto; only the Philistine
Sets the font of creation
Sans seraph; even the simpleton knows
The asceticism of the architect’s engineering
Is no cause for an iconoclasm in his design:
While the sun serves as center for our calculations,
In our contemplation, the grave remains the axis
Of our turn. |
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