Isotropic

After the launching of the Hubble Space Telescope,

April 25, 1990

Looked at in different directions,

the universe shows no significant

difference in its general appearance-

no blue shifts, nothing coming our way,

no change imminent; everything's red-shifted

and rotating outward, bright arm over arm

in the same expanding sea... .

It's as if we've been standing

at the bottom of a pool, looking up

at the rippling colors and flight of birds,

the way we've had to chart and ponder

heavenly bodies beaming down to us

through stardust and patinas of our air.

Now a new observatory runs laps beyond

our atmosphere, copestone on that breathless ledge

of black-its floating beryllium eye

fixed on the un-edited ticker tape of light,

those naked lines exponentially deconstructing

in their own nonstop play back of the past,

their medium the only message

about a point in time beyond any point

in time and that undoing that set things

spinning on the logarithm of the dark.

And though the new thinking sees it all

without the chaotic and misleading sprawl

of motes that's underwritten our reasoning

for so long and saved us from considering

a serious connection to design, some cataract

across the lens, it appears, will keep

this finally from us for yet a little while.

But even when the unfiltered news comes through,

is it likely we'll undergo a sea change,

so to speak, and find a bright new continent

at the heart of it instead of the one

we've been sailing for all along?

When I look up to the plaster and ceiling beams,

water-damaged from another season's rains,

I see amber ellipses and tea-colored swirls,

which, drifting toward the window and the wall,

look like dried roses, or equally like nebulae

with their dense palm-print and smudge of suns.

Yet birds still slipstream on their magnetic,

star-gazed routes, and still the prevailing winds

pause a little and allow that cider scent of autumn

to loiter on the afternoon-the high western sky

reading left to right as always, and the blue

tree dahlias corresponding-

then the horizon

spills out like a glass of light and dust, the violet

overtones finely invisible as our breath

as we sit smiling among the fallen leaves,

collars turned up around our necks as we stare

inefficiently toward our old constabulary of stars,

that same light we've seen all along,

light which will one day rise

through our shoulder blades and arms

and set us blindly off, more white and weightless

than the air we leave behind.