The Flammarion engraving (artist unknown)

#90

The Milky Way is stone and silent fire,
Flying ice and dust, and expanding gas,
But what we find within the heliosphere
Suggests a whilom laboratory
Where the essential elements were cast
And the residues made preparatory
For the distillation that's planet Earth:
Europa's water, Io's sulfur,
Gases from Saturn and Jupiter,
Engineered for the terrestrial birth.
The traveler sees, beyond a starry veil,
Cosmic clockwork, eternal music.
Kneeling, he lifts a hand as if to hail
His Maker, the tinkering mechanic.

Jacob Wrestling With The Angel (Rembrandt)

#89

In my blindness after midnight I could not see
If the shade I wrestled was a man or woman.
I say shade but it was not without its own light,
Or shades of a color, like the edge of the sea
Is a million greens and the sand a million tans.
I wouldn't let go; you wouldn't call it a fight.
Our muscles were a conflict between oak and wind,
My hold was firm and unyielding, its holy grip
Gave but held; impatient, it wrenched my hip.
Was the pain meant to test the firmness of my mind?
As the sun rose, I said, "Bless me and I'll let go."
"I can," it said, "Now you know what you know."
I did not overcome God, as the angel said,
But myself. He knows me now. I am not afraid.

Road With Cypress And Star (Van Gogh)

#88

Why is everything about distance, not place?
A star isn't just light years away -- it is fire.
The moon we traveled to no longer had a face.
The Milky Way is largely tar, with a little briar.
Leave the universe be. Space is only backdrop,
Incommensurable, a dim futility,
A perfect but incomprehensible beauty.
Suspend exertion and let all wondering stop.
Don't even follow the road to the cypress tree.
Go straight through mown grass and harvested fields,
Until the cypress is the only thing you see,
Until its scent is the only light its leaves yield.
What is will then displace all distances
And take away from time all instances.

Four Riffs on "Three Musicians" (Picasso)

#87

A tune is the ultimate abstraction,
An emotion expressed as a fraction.
Some notes invariably repeated
Become a cold emotion reheated.

Not all musicians are made of music.
Some are talent, some mere facility.
The best I've known live a necessity,
Like physicists slave to mathematics.

Picasso's clowns can only make us dance,
Twist our senses into a whirling trance.

I've wept at the silence a conductor
Held at the end of the Ninth of Mahler,
As if to say, "Behold what's gone before --
Anguish, redemption, hope -- and don't despair."

Autumnal Fantasy (Charles Burchfield)

#86

We could see each moment as a story,
Murmurs of focused imagination --
Illustrated by the moon or the sun --
From the collected works of satori.
We're told that such enlightenment is rare,
Or as ever-present as the air,
Though only if we take the time to breathe.
The nuthatch can ignore the withered leaves
And be ignored by the leaves in their turn,
But each day we fail to irradiate
The forest with our consciousness we burn
It down. We all have stories to relate;
Some we've been shown, but most we must create.
It's the easiest thing, to be. Don't wait.

The Local Group (Hubble)

#85

Andromeda and the Milky Way collide
In the next few billion years, or so:
Not why Frost said, "provide, provide,"
Though it's not a bad way to go.
With some two trillion stars at risk
In the melding of galactic discs,
Odds of stars clashing are rather low.
Consider, the star nearest the sun:
Proxima Centauri; a distant son,
Unlikely to visit anytime soon.
Perhaps a stray Andromedan moon
Might sail our way. With some delay,
The Local Group will join the fray
And bring an end to night and day.

The Sacrifice of Isaac (Rembrandt)

#84

Abraham's great hand covers the mouth and eyes
Of his son; the thrust of the knife so imminent
The angel's grip must knock it from his hand.
"Burnt offering," he was told, so meant to slice
The throat as he would a ram's. God is silent.
The angel, we assume at his Master's command,
Points to Heaven and explains away the slaughter.
Abraham has proven his fear of God, which is all
That's required. In reward, his sons and daughters
Will multiply like stars; his enemies' gates will fall,
And his seed will bless all the nations of the earth.
To the old man it must feel like his own rebirth.
Though his face shows neither terror nor relief,
There is bafflement at the grim power of his belief.