Daniel Tobin

In a life below decks in a great ship, windowless, butterflies in lamplight are moving as they move. Fish swim indifferently inside their bowl, two men toss a ball, each to each, as the ship speeds, head- long ahead, and nothing's driven back to the stern since to go with this motion is to be moored in port. From the tallest mountain at the mind’s white pole a cannon fires its charges into space, progressive speed, till one ball, by falling, flies, by flying, falls. Now the surfer catches a wave of frozen light and rides it motionless to an impossible shore where he reckons sand the particles of his path: and twins, one traveled from earthbound earth, the other staying home, meet again after years, each to the other younger from when he left. The cat in its dire box keeps equally live and dead, the poison released, should hammer shatter flask when the atom decays, which it may not, or it may. You, who chose two ways equally at once, circuit the conferences, meetings fueled by enigma, mixing with the eminent and their sidereal regard, your morning Masses before library and lab. All outcomes must be possible in the system—Schrödinger. In your life's chosen box, this con-celebration.

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.”

In the film that doesn’t begin and never ends, a man wakes, drives to a country farmhouse where he finds the guests he knows from his recurring dream, each telling their own strange tale to him, the architect called in to pitch his new design—a fratricidal son, that ventriloquist whose dummy mouths his life— progressive horror, till from his nightmare the man wakes, drives to a country farmhouse where he finds the guests he knows from his recurring dream. . . . So with Dead of Night, Bondi, Gold, and Hoyle wake to their design, the universe a Steady State, a cloud that never moves from its mountaintop, one droplet added for every one lost. Or like our own bodies freshened cell by cell, creation continuous, God-less, and atoms bred from atoms from alchemical stars. You drive with Hoyle in the hills above Montalcino, the cloth merchant’s son, outspoken, caustic, truant, who would label you comically “The Big Bang Man,” arguing the probabilities: “What matter, Fred, creates itself?” “Nothing, my dear Georges, then in an instant a universe?” All that is, is, is spinning on a pencil point. And you in his dinner portrait of you, a Friday fast, coveting his steak, the enormous, undesired fish appearing to stay the same size however much you eat.

Unreel the human weave to molten stone And still you’ll find the upraised arm of  Cain. The hand that rigged the flesh in Abu Ghraib Caressed another’s for the feel of  home.