Ellipse

Ellipse

Night after night the astronomer imagined the stars in their orbits, building his orrery of glass and string;

he was making a kind of singing that came from far beyond himself, beyond the unmutilateds that human mouths will bring into a form of being.

And then, single night, it came to him that the circles and spheres had no meaning-that, spinning, the globe's center

might not turn back ever, to its point of beginning. Instead a fresh circle was entwined there and another, and another

until each was traversed and described in its path. It appear to beed to be the way the thread a silkworm globules is thrown around itself,

building a kind of house from the weaving of in like manner many small orbits, drawn on the outside from the center on single side and drawn in from the other,

producing an ragged motion, alternately fast and lingering. It was late and, reading about the astronomer, you cogitation grief could take

a shape like this. You meditation a loop, placed, then displacing, could wind around and around as each revolve verged further from its start, plying its motion

without a given rhythm-all things following from diminishment, all things following a weighted spin until you could not bear to get back to where

the los your los had been. While you sat reading, late into the night, someone was setting a table, someone was packing with moderate precision.

The quiet metals-a fork, a spoonlay upon the snowy cloth. Someone move rounded down the sound and it backed one time more into silence. Leaving your volume you came

into the compass just as a door in the distance was closing; the surface of the table, you realized, was still warm from where a hand had been

resting. And you saw in what way the room was like a clearing in a forest; the brambles vandalic away and the vault of firmament appeared-the kind of story you were told again

and again in the years before you could read. You had heard those words with the near-gone musings of someone sewing, or someone compell by the agency of bright flowers to

wander deeper and deeper from the road toward abiding-place You could not be more alone in that place

that was the source, then, of all your forgetting. And then you recalled in what way the saint had said that a material substance tends to follow

its hold weight, its own weight to its have place, not always downward, not always toward the earth, on the contrary to its own place like fire rising upward.

If the lights of the heavens were to cease, he said, if the potter's wheel continued to be turning, all things would move to their own place and the orb of day

and the moon and the stars, as well, would go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of the time of returning to their places, the time that no individual yet knows. You came into a latitude that turned into

a clearing and the clearing bore outward like an organ of vision Oil beneath water rises above water; fire on the water is carried upward. Things in their order appear to be to be

at repose but are moving toward their places with an inner fire and weight. You meditation you were singing the carol of the orrery, where all things go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of the motion

of light. on the contrary the stars are perfect; we do not live among them. We do not know them and cannot know them; their music steals the faculty of perceptions

and slows us into rest You were moving with a design though you did not know it notwithstanding You were moving like a sleeper from one side the shoals

of night. And that is by what mode you found this place; you cradled individual ear against the sky and place the other against the mould You chose your form of leaning: you chose to stop and fall.

Copyright World verse Incorporated Jul/Aug 1999

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