Earth’s Answer

Another night of Galileo arguing with William Blake —

the one with an angel in his tree, believing

"Where humans are not, nature is barren."

The other, il saggiotore and curious Venetian,

pointing politely to his optical tube:

If the gentleman would look out the window,

at the three moons of Ellipsis . . .        

No more sleeping this night, so rising I struggle with bards. 

One heard the furnace, Orc-rending an ocean,

all Beulah weeping.  And one saw the revolution. 

Long has creation been taken as that live tongue,

telling, in crumbling ores and recumbent folds,

in fugitive colors and the long clear combs of the sea. 

Indifferent, the plenum yet sounds as siren

and provocateur on the drum of our whorled ears

down dainty canals made by thunder and sighs.

Yet loosed as we are from the eerie circuitry of ants,

we wander, and wandering weave a connective tissue.

Even Galileo's descendants, in the deep sweet dream

of objectivity weave — as once a physicist,

dismissing metaphor and all its errancy, said,

by way of illustration: "The planet is only

a tennis ball, with a bit of fuzz for life.”

I did not chortle, I did not mock. I sympathized.        

Numberless, the natures of a world that keeps faith

and does the astronomer's will as well.

As first light comes, the mortar and pestle on my sill

grow red in the sun, burning as the need to know.

The colors look ripe to be taken, and I could use that red,

that unhurried crimson, salmon, surefire, sanguine bloom.

 Only lead us not, we pray, into petty thieving.

first published in The Carolina Quarterly, 1987; revised slightly 2024
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