Christopher Buckley

General Science

But the first idea was not to shape the clouds
In imitation. The clouds preceded us.

—W. Stevens

 

 A few of us had seen Wernher von Braun
on Disneyland promoting rocket travel into space,
but on that 1st day of class, Sozzi, Schneider, and I
sat in the back folding jet planes from binder paper
and firing them out the wide windows into the blue
as Sister spun two globes on her desk—a light-blue one
of the Earth and a black one with yellow constellations
of stars—and told us there was an immense magnetic
bubble that surrounded and protected the world
and kept atoms spinning in our cells, as invisible
as our guardian angels . . . as believable as anything
else we’d been told, despite no evidence presented,
and not a single beam of celestial light streaming
through any of us, not even Maggie Tappenier
who knew the answers to just about everything. . . .
I looked out to the rib bones of clouds stacked above
eucalyptus and palms, and without a 2nd thought
preferred their eloquent untethered associations
to the arithmetical extrapolations in our text. . . .

*          *          *

Who knows now where all that time’s gone? Einstein
might, if he’s out there orbiting in the exosphere.
Einstein with his star-white hair who, like me,
didn’t like to show his work—a lot of it figured out
in his head while playing violin in the kitchen.

The best I can come up with is clouds continuing
to circle the earth—continuing being the operative term—
as Einstein’s calculations concluded that stars 25x
heavier than our sun would collapse and curve
the sea-surface of space, forming a bound state—
i.e., a black hole—inside of which, time comes

to an end.

                 But let’s not go there. None of that
sorts out the dead clouds dragging the horizon along
above the tamarisks lining the cliff—their dry,
bare arms surrendering to a sky that appears to be
tired of everything. . . . I still have as much of a grasp
of the universe as our cats did of the world outside
our fenced yard where they could never go—
multi-verses, M-theory, 11-dimensional superstrings—
exotic bits and pieces I read about in dumbed-down books
on cosmology each night before drifting off to sleep,
mixing each fantastic fact or expanding supposition
with the supporting effects of Sauvignon Blanc poured
over a moon-white ice cube or two, as I sit beneath
the cosmic whisper, and galactic frittatas red-shifted
into an inconclusive night, where we’re nothing
but an azure dot in an outlying carousel of light . . . .

This afternoon, I close my notebook, and look up
at contrails streaking the sky into the invisible . . . .
When we look out into space, we’re looking back
in time . . . and no matter what we think we know,
there’s no way to be sure which stars are there,
or which have vanished behind their light?

 

Lost Faith

When I stick my head out the window,

I can still hear that old socio-economic blues pulsing over

the avenues where I was let go

with no idea where I’d turn up work next week. I’d given up

on St. Michael and the Union reps

manifesting above the Coronado Bridge in Versace overalls,

handing out bonuses—early 20s,

my imagination unchecked. I found my only consolation in Pablo

chewing out the old sentimental boys

in high collars and floppy cravats ignoring bus drivers, nitrate miners,

                             seamstresses, all who needed more

than a 1/2-hour lunch and payroll savings plan, who endured

          pain in their knees and sacroiliacs,

pain of car repairs and rent, a sack of groceries scraped together

          while walking home beneath their

defeated stars, and who never had a minute to ask Nietzsche

          if there was meaning in suffering?

 

I still shrug my shoulders, and ignore the chicken scratch of stars,

indecipherable as ever.  If you want

to ask the heavens for something, try more time. . . . Add a zero

to the cloud count and see if

you’re carried off with a daydream above the financial center.

Sure, I copied out my lessons but

there was no chance of diagramming our atoms in the run-on

sentences of light—the silver outlining

a horizon’s edge was all the suggestion of another world we were

going to get.  Pause, and watch

a star break loose and shoot across the night—which wish, exactly,

was it you were counting on? At dusk,

it’s only finches arguing in the air, descending from nothing

more than the high and vacuous

firmament, the burden of the sky. . . .  What does it finally matter

what you want, the Buddha says?