Naked Eye

May 6 2020

I prefer the naked eye.

So the whole Milky Way

spills out across the sky
like glitter in a whirlwind.

And where what appear to be stars

are actually distant galaxies,

their light

older than time.

Or at least time

as we take its measure

from this minor planet

and its middle-aged sun.

Letting my eye adjust,

opening up, as the darkness deepens.

A long unrushed look,

so stars keep appearing

until the heavens fill,

and there's no mistaking a planet

against the background of sky.
Its slow majestic transit, like a vagabond star,

but bigger and brighter

and with a steadier light.

Once a god,

but now demoted

to mere heavenly body

among countless more.

And then a falling star;

which is not a star at all

but an erratically shaped

dull black rock,

its surface scarred, its spin off-centre

burning to cinders

as it collides with earth.

As if it had never even existed,

after billions of years

circling undisturbed.

The cushion of air

in which it burns

is a mere 10 miles thick  —

Saran Wrap thin

around a basketball earth.

All there is

between us

and the cold black void of space.

On a frigid night
in the fastness of winter,

when it's dry and still

and as clear as it gets.

A slightly smudged glass

through which we peer darkly

and truly glimpse our smallness.

The power of a telescope is tempting: compressing distance; seeing the unseeable; seeing as if for the first time and you were the only one. It's understandable that one might want more tech, more power, more magnification. But this blinkered view of the universe misses its majesty. And pressing your eye to the glass becomes analogous to the reductionism of science, in which you isolate a small piece of reality and control for any anomaly; but in so doing never get the big picture or understand how things might fit and work together. So in this poem the writer does with less. He lies back and looks up at the night sky with the unaided eye, taking it in just as it is: not analyzing, cataloguing, over-thinking, or imposing any predetermined worldview.

The atmosphere actually goes up 300 miles, but most of this is thin and rarefied: the warm dense air we need to live is within 10 miles of the surface. The analogy to Saran Wrap around a basketball is sobering: what a fragile thing is life on planet earth; how small, remote, and vulnerable.