"telescope" poem

this poem was in a recent New Yorker magazine, by Louise Gluck (both of whom
own the copyright--just covering me butt).

sean nolan


TELESCOPE

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you've been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You've stopped being here in the world.
You're in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You're not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you're in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

how old are you?



Ocean779 wrote:

this poem was in a recent New Yorker magazine, by Louise Gluck (both of whom
own the copyright--just covering me butt).

sean nolan

TELESCOPE

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you've been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You've stopped being here in the world.
You're in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You're not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you're in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.

On 22 Jan 2005 05:35:12 GMT, Ocean779 wrote:


There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you've been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You've stopped being here in the world.
You're in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.



The entire poem is very beautiful, yet had it stopped at only the above
seven lines, it would have said it all for me.

Thanks for finding the poem and sharing it here.


--
Martin R. Howell
"Photographs From the Universe of Amateur Astronomy"
http://members.isp.com/universeofama...nomy%40isp.com

When I'm at the telescope I have this strange feeling of standing on
the surface of an enormous ball covered in small fields. With other
observers dotted about on the same curved surface all looking up at the
same time.

My mind is stretched and excited by the sheer scale of everything. To
me the planets really seem to hang as huge spheres in empty space.
There is an accute sense of vast distances and unimaginable size,
despite the tiny image seen through the eyepiece. Only at the eyepiece
is the sense of wonder maintained. No probes or close-up pictures can
ever conjure up the sheer magic of looking for yourself in real time.

The telescope does not magnify the image for me. It carries me to a
point a little way off from the planet. There is a distinct transition
point between the reality of a small sharp view from the imaginary
window of my hovering spacecraft. And the larger, but softer view,
where reality is lost.

Chris.B