(Observance)
By Daniel Tobin
Edwin Hubble
“Tall, strong, beautiful, with the shoulders of Hermes
of Praxiteles, that is how my wife first fashioned me,
I who proved our Milky Way but another galaxy
among the Nebelflecken fleeing breakneck with the rest
by the law, the constant, the time that bear my name:
Hubble, stamped with Newton, Copernicus, Galileo.
Not bad for an Ozark farm boy hodded off to Oxford
on a Rhodes, who tailored himself to tweeds and speaks
the King’s English, as though he’d suckled on shires.
Astronomy, I attest, is a history of receding horizons,
though mine tend to open to dinners with Stravinsky,
the Fairbanks, and coup de maître, my surprise star-turn
at the Oscars: spotlights, applause, the whole heavens
blue-shifted to me. Still—nothing headier than nights
on Mt. Wilson, eye at the lens, my briar pipe glowing,
Humason at the spectrascope tracing the light shifts
who was my mule driver. His habits—straight poker,
panther juice—try the soul, but he’s brilliant at the shot.
Odd, too, the little priest who came to visit years ago,
that he should account for nebulas’ radial velocities
two years before me, though I only trust the data—
how he looked calmly pleased at Einstein’s recantation:
The most beautiful solution to creation I have ever heard.
So clocks reel back with space—camera, action, light.”
Copyright Credit: Daniel Tobin, "(Observance)" from From Nothing. Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Tobin. Reprinted by permission of Four Way Books, www.fourwaybooks.com.
Source: From Nothing (Four Way Books, 2016)