The Sun and the Moon
Do the axes and poles
That tug at our lives, that mold
Us to earth, do the black holes
And novas which hold
Us in thrall manage the tiniest bit
To rotate our soul?
Can the forces that orbit,
That push tides in the sea,
Shaping oceans in their bare
Hands, so that waves and that fish
Do not float in the air:
Can such gravities as nourish
The obvious tensions between
Imagined reactions and actual actions
Prove what the death of stars means,
Or how their lethal contractions
Overlook us mostly by chance?
And does the snow, piling on rails
And up to car handles, dance
Like the pines in the wind, the mail
Box buried, and in due time choirs
Of angels touching together their canopies
Of ice and of rime, our American Flyers
Lost in the snow, in the freeze;
And does the stillness of town,
Muffled in midnight events,
In drifts and in blizzards and all around
The separate flakes of a thing immense
Softly sweeping from clouds
Above our huddled heads, does this
Sanction the night, or the crowds
Of carolers, vague in the mist?
Can any of this set the date
Of our birth, of our marriage, or death,
Can the moon rising validate
The normal rate of our breath,
Where some relevant power
Slows the motionless air,
Still, at a million miles an hour,
Whirling around an atmosphere
Where everyday currents
Die, but the universal roar
Of the sky, of stars and the planets,
Shakes the roulette to its core,
The anchor that seems to pin
The wooden wheel of the sun,
The green baize where all of us spin,
The merry-go-round where we run
And push with a kind
Of gullible, artless trust,
Because your grandfather and mine,
And my mother, landed in just
That pocket, when the ground,
When the dawn, comes up and thrives,
And our fate and our love revolve around
One Christmas day in our lives?
March 9th–14th, 2022
Kaiholu
Explanation
Cathy’s grandmother, my mother, and my grandfather were all born on Christmas Day. My mother and grandfather also died on Christmas Day. They were grandfathered in. Although I am of rational mind, with all my senses about me, I am occasionally inclined to wonder at the many coincidences we experience all the time that exert an invisible pull on the course of our lives.
The book Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees points out how we wouldn’t exist if these numbers were varied at all, even by a thousandth of a percent. We are the beneficiaries of a cosmic system which can be hostile, like a black hole, or benign, like our atmosphere or gravity. Even black holes anchor the galaxies which spin around them. Both vast and minute phenomena collaborate in our existence. Even the coincidences of our relatives being born on Christmas Day seem part of the cossetting skein of the universe.