There is not a single sky but rather a diversity
of single sky-moments strung out like beads
on a celestial necklace. The Greeks believed
in a single sky with Zeus its ruler
and his son Apollo a traveler
traversing it each day like the conductor
on a modern railway train. Any child knows better
now, knows that the sun is a burning cloud
of hydrogen, a fire that is never extinguished,
just as the sea never stops feeding the sky
with the clouds bringing rain. Like those clouds
the sky lends itself to much vain speculation.
“Very like a whale,” Prince Hamlet says,
agreeing with Polonius, but he is not being
serious. No cloud is even approximately
whale-like. [See Table 3, in Appendix D:
Cloud shapes.] Nor should we try to analyze
the sky in terms of ages and eras. The sky
does not have its own French and Indian Wars.
It has, as we have observed above, moments.
To begin to understand the sky
you must find a vantage high enough
to command a view in all directions,
some mountain top or the crow’s-nest
of a ship at sea. Then you must integrate
your observations with those of sky-chroniclers
in other latitudes, measuring such variables
as Bright and Cloudy, Auspicious and Dull,
and set these down in a bound ledger.
At first the task may seem beyond
your capabilities. It is! History is
a humbling discipline. The sky is finally unknowable,
but only its historians know that.
February 19, 2008
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Author: The Best American Poetry
