(Observance)

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.”