for Nat Jansz

Low in the south sky shines
the stern white lamp
of planet Jupiter. A man
on the radio said
it’s uncommonly close,
and sequestered in the telescope lens
it’s like a compère, spotlit,
driving its borrowed light
out to all sides equally
while, set in a row in the dark
beyond its blaze,
like seed-pearls,
or coy new talents
awaiting their call onstage
—what must be, surely,
the Galilean moons.
In another room,
my children lie asleep, turning
as Earth turns, growing
into their own lives, leaving me
a short time to watch, eye
to the eye-piece,
how a truth unfolds—
how the moonlets glide
out of their chance alignment,
each again to describe
around its shared host its own
unalterable course. Tell me,
Galileo, is this
what we’re working for?
—the knowledge that in just
one Jovian year
the children will be gone
uncommonly far, their bodies
aglow, grown, talented – become
mere bright voice-motes
calling from the opposite
side of the world . . .
what else would we want
our long-sighted instruments
to assure us of ? I’d like
to watch for hours, see
what you old astronomers
apprehended for the first time,
bowed to the inevitable…
but it’s late already:
the next day’s obligations
pluck at my elbow
like an infant who needs his mother,
next-door’s dog barks,
and cloud arrives, distilled,
it appears, out of nothing.

Originally published in Poetry Review 101:4,Winter 2011.