Four Lives Joe Gonnella
©2020 Joe Gonnella JoeGonnella.com
Auto-da-fĂŠ Instants, hours, days and dawns Dance to the laughter of the passing year. Partnered by the moon and sun Real things exit, real things come: Sunlight gilds wind-enchanted leaves. Minutes, sunsets, months and seasons Forge memory's bright tools from dreams. A future, self-conceived, redeems The emerald echoes of its past By knocking on the only door there is: Leafless branches frame cloud-entangled trees. Seconds, decades, centuries and eons Spin even atoms into swirls of dust. All planets begin as densities in flux Each night is blacker than the next Until obsidian centers flare sapphire To blaze the scattered foliage of protosuns Into jewels of self-consuming fire.
Galileo Galilei Eppur si muove.
I Mercury's wand or Cupid's arrow, An optical reed; occhiale, to Galileo, To Demisiano, telescope, with which to view The phases of Venus or the mountains on the moon; A perspicillum to measure the dance of Jupiter's children And enumerate the plurality of worlds. An old man's sad eyes look up From his eyepiece, gaze across the dark streets Of Florence. He dreams he can lure The moon from heaven. He tells us There is a magic in all motion we just can't see; Something in the freefall of a stone Equivalent to the meristem at the twig's tip, Or the intelligence guiding a carpenter's hand. He has placated his fear that nothing happens here, That everything is dead except for what's inside him. His heartbeat is the pulse of stars. His breath The life and death of planets. He knows There is an ancient order to this disarray That abrogates all borders, fills the void And overflows the edges of the world we see. He knows there are people, to whom dark Comes before evening, who will never understand him.
In this sad kingdom of tongues without voices, He has seen their eyes burn to their last ember. In contrast to the silence of the sky, The bird he wished himself to be, rises On extended wings, sings itself alive. Above him, despite all he knows, an inhuman music Echoes against spheres within spheres, vibrates in an ether Where no creature's ever drawn a breath. Blue moderates to black and the Medician stars, Sure of their own mandate, intimate infinity To the lynx-eyed watcher who has tempted the planets Down from their very heavens to bear witness To a reality his own eyes can't deny. To harmonize what he's touched To what he sees, he will destroy A world he loves, scatter its ashes Among the pigeons in the great piazza, Measure the declension of a society's contempt Against the angle of his own despair. No wings will raise him high enough; no pain Lead him deeper into the unfathomable well Within which even the secrets of daylight are hidden. Only the cold glass of his lenses can lift the sky's veil To lay bare the bodies of heaven. Lynceus the argonaut could not have seen this far. The invention of these crystals Has changed the fiber of what is.
We can no longer sleep the sleep of servile minds, Nor can we make an oracle of a wooden image And run to that for answers. We are too subtle And too curious. It's true. It's true. Stars revolve around stars. Our earth Is not the center. The sun in evident radiance Must bear the weight of every circling world Until our eyes no longer close In sacred enmity to secular truth.
II Born in Shakespeare's year, he found No surface smooth, no edge exactly even. A master of questions he had no ready answers But he knew the weight of numbers, the value Of intuition and that the Pope and Bellarmine Were not gods on earth but a prince and his vassal To be dealt with or deposed, conquered or convinced. Who could have been a better counterpart? Saint Bellarmine, Virgil's devotee, Poliziano's friend, Had the gift of prophecy. He could neither chide a child, Nor leave a punchline well enough alone. An impish merriment pervaded all his days. The burning of Giordono was another matter. A foolish man, with no gaiety in him, could expect nothing less Than the touch of Spanish fire under a simple Roman sun. Bellarmine's dove cried out for revenge On what a human mind had wrought. So Bruno road the Inquisitor's braying mule From Santa Maria sopra Minerva to Campo dei Fiori. There was a fierce devotion in this cardinal No king or heretic could quench. To spite The possible devil within and to please The actual God without, he preached a middle knowledge To some who would inevitably refuse it. When he felt a heretic should burn He animated merciless law to murder him
For kindness' sake. For didn't God know all? Was his grace not adequate? The sky to human eyes was nothing But an accident. Each falling star, A complete enigma, until what Apocalypse revealed Might come to pass. The world must have its destination And Bellarmine was there to float his laity Past Copernican reefs to their salvation.
III Galileo polemicized, prattled, begged and prayed Until Prospero's tears mingled with Quixote's bones And the clerics' great machine Ground the planets to a fine white dust. Nothing remained as it was. In Bellarmine's eyes the earth was still The immovable center. Beneath its stony crust The devil and his demons dwelt in a material fire That burnt their disembodied souls to cinders. Who could deny the evidence? Jupiter's occluding moons Were not a model for a larger plan. Man's naked eye Superseded an image inverted in a lens. The sun rose and set as Ptolemy believed Around a stationary earth. The planets In their epicyclic orbits followed suit. An angel moved the spheres and all the stars. Only Joshua could stop the circling fire in its tracks And call the God of battle down upon his enemies. The Prince of heaven was undismayed. God's works cannot subvert his words. When he wishes our very clocks would run retrograde Or a man stands still while those he leaves behind must age. Our world works in more mysterious ways Than canon or corporate law can explain. Prince's power is what's at stake: the curious
Justice the topmost rock administers On all the stones below. What the Pope fears most Is branded on each heretic's brow, A pride of intellect his Holiness can't control, A singular willingness to elaborate a vision No priest can endorse, or legate validate. Each generation receives its knowledge from the one before. Nothing changes. Unless an unmastered voice Enunciates new images in the night. There is a crater below the center of the moon Rimmed by mountains. Tall peaks at varied heights Catch the light at different times as the sun rises. From the earth we see bright islands in the dark Disrupt the crescent moon's clean edge. The surface Can't be smooth. This is what Galileo ponders One night of many as he squints through his lenses To track his starry messenger across the Milky Way. Heaven and earth mingle in his mind. We breathe the stuff of stars with him. The atoms Of our exhalations will burn again inside the sun. There is no chasm between these worlds. Even partial knowledge spans our emptiness, Threads all points with fabricated laws Until our senses weave whole cloth on the universal loom.
In commerce with light and close kin to sun's fire, I kiss the motionless sphere shining from the pages Of his book. Images in a vial that preserves The pure extraction of a living mind, His words are dragon's teeth, seeds of an armed progeny Waiting to spring from each inky character Into the reader's eyes and war on the collective darkness Harbored there until clear projections of discerning flames Bring bright perspective to our damaged sights.
IV A title page may be unlicensed; a book may burn, A man abjure and a mind be turned, But can an Inquisitor controvert a universe? Milton knew the dangers Galileo faced; knew as well No park gate could hem the pigeons in. No crow can fly as high as an angel can. A real crow flies quite high enough. Galileo soared into his fray as easily as he abandoned The Most Serene Republic. Padova had harbored The unorthodox Sarpi and Cremonini these many years. An excommunicate Veneto just did not care About Paul or any other Pope. The meddling Jesuits Had long since been expelled to trouble Cathay and New Spain. In papal Florence and, later, in the Vatican's Rome A jubilant Galileo burst Ptolemy's eighty orbs And defused each landmine the Aristotelians' laid. When told the craggy precipices of the moon Were enclosed in a smooth, translucent sphere, He granted the existence of such stuff but announced He had seen invisible mountains ten times higher Than the darker mountains he had observed before. He railed, jousted and explained until he felt close To winning all. He must have been surprised When Cardinal Bellarmine and the Inquisition's Dominicans Asked to be closeted with him for a private conversation. He was informed of the Curia's decision regarding The Copernican view. Their instructions were quite clear. He could neither hold nor teach The opinions Pythagoras held true.
The sun was not the center of the world. The earth had no diurnal motion. So, for eight silent years Galileo kept his sky-damaged eyes shut tight In absolute submission to his church. From whatever level he serves in hell Barbarini's ghost now comes to drink In Anticlea's place at the bloody fosse. Instigator and betrayer, he suffered a sea change No one has yet explained. As Cardinal, He was inducted into the Lincean Society Of explorers after truth. As Pope, He raised his fellows' hopes That the church at last would liberate science. He met with Galileo many times, Said he would not clip the wings of his subtle speculations, Encouraged him to write his Dialogues. Months after the publication of the book Barbarini flew into a rage, reversed his views and let slip The Inquisition's dogs on the old astronomer. Weighed by our assayer in his balance Barbarini's motives are shy of what was bargained for By more than a feather's weight. For once, Galileo must have shaken his head, Not at the ways of God but at the ways of men. Confronted by commodity's wheel, he chose not to burn. Kneeling in a penitent’s white shirt before Barbarini's Profane board, he utterly abjured all his impieties. Exiting the room, he stamped his foot down hard, Whispered to the guard, Still, it moves.
V Locked inside a labyrinth of spheres Neptune looks up from his chores to watch The Argo's keel cut the final stretch of sea. The moon's eternal pearl is transformed to jagged ore. Dark traces give the globe its grain. Jason plows the field of Mars until the world of clay Rises to the stars. A circle of radiant fire Curves across the clear, black sky like molten iron Pouring from a crucible. Millennia of faith Precede the millennium of doubt. As water receives moonlight so I receive Galileo's words Until his mind and mine blend into one. Nurtured by the pupils' black and adamantine gates The world he was born into enters through my eyes. True copies of what's missing come to be! Whether from heaven, earth or hell the power latent In these images strikes at us, rends the inward spaces Of our hearts. Listen to me. Look at me. Open your eyes if you can. Galileo is elusive Only to the sightless. Imprison him, ages and years. Scald his heart, months and days. Hours, weapons, Daughters of time undo the knot death cannot undo. The sun's Phoenix, older than the world, Remains as it was. Galileo changes. He finds no pleasure kinder than death's indifferent smile. Our brief paths lead to a thousand ruins.
There is one prefigured end for each of us. Because of him, each traveler knows, When Charon dips his oar, the boat moves, not the shore. Like footprints fading from sunned snow, So fades his image in my memory. Each fallen leaf bears an emblem from Galileo's oracle. If one could read these pages in the strew, Nature's gist would be as legible as Braille is to blind fingers. Isis gathers Osiris' limbs to piece the truth together again. While his body breathes, subtlety exfoliates subtlety, Accident and substance fuse, rainbow mingles with rainbow. In an exhalation of pure fire, a recreated man Squares a circle amidst scattered leaves. Though he has no wings, his eagle eyes will lift him Above God's farrago of spheres and orbs Until the love that burns inside each star Ignites within him an irrevocable desire to move In perfect balance with cold nature's undiscovered laws.
Johannes Kepler Babylonian words become less ancient names. Wandering Nebo births inconstant Mercury; Marduk cedes to Jupiter and Negral bows to Mars; Saturn bursts pale Ninth's shell; As Ishtar unveils Venus to an audience of stars. Each planet's angel sings in unheard harmony With Orpheus' lyre. Whole numbers hum A universal music only Pythagoras can hear. Behold, how rhythmic mythologies of math Slow as they sail from heaven's spheres Through muddy air to pulse against our untuned ears. We sleep through sounds our senses cannot measure, In rooms full of waves we can't perceive. We dream unremembered dreams proved only By an absence alive inside our silence. As Herakleides to Aristarchus, so Galileo Is to Newton or Copernicus to Kepler. Where one soul begins, another ends. When one body dies, one is born again. The constant flux of particles in a wave Reveals a pattern of points not reached. The improbable predicates the possible. A measure of uncertainty is presupposed By a reckoning of sand. Incarcerated angels Or spirits incarnate, the wise seldom see the light.
The ignorant treasure darkness. Above a brightening shore, all fiery red, The planets withdraw behind the sky's blue curtain. I stare at the half disk of the sun As Neptune's salt green streams run yellow gold. Waves in frenzy crash, retreat and crest. These are the appearances we were meant to save. When Kepler asked, Why are you what you are, He found his answers in the stars. The soul of a man is the point of a pin Wherein the form and character of the heavens May be engraved, were all they contain Ten thousand times as large. The sky does something to a man: decrees Which child will be a prodigy, which an epileptic. As a hen scratching in a barnyard May find a decent kernel or a silkworm Writhe out of a heap of common worms So Kepler says each of us will find a pearl Within Astrology's blasphemies. Patterns determined by a particular sky Allow our souls to grow just so. Like a vine tended by a vintner Who follows established rules For each plant's nurturing, Our lives resonate in universal harmony Within limits set by mathematical laws.
To find the hook God hung the heavens from, Kepler's mind rocks back and forth In its place like the waves of the sea. He invented one world, snuffed out another, Until Plato's perfect solids set him free. A dream's arabesque became a tested vision, Spirit engendered force, the hieroglyphs of myth Resolved into the formulas of science. Fertile error led him toward the central fire Where a geometer's parable blossomed in his mind And a thousand roots spread nowhere all at once. Why waste words? God's seed predates creation. Hear what the spinner of these webs has spoken: Numbers existed before God's eyes were open. Kepler slipped the cube's first perfect form Inside Saturn's sphere. He inscribed within that cube Jupiter's orb and, within that orb, he shaped An equal-sided pyramid to encase the track of Mars. Within Mar's great circle, a dodecahedron cradled Earth And in its turn the globe formed by the path of Earth Enclosed a twelve-sided solid that encoffined Venus' sphere. Within that bubble, an octahedron's shape Encrypted hot Mercury in its swift circuit Round the fiery diamond of the sun. He constructed this celestial model out of paper In the figure of a cup Duke Frederic's silversmiths Never struck. In his mind each planet was to be Represented by a gem, each sphere was to pour
A distinct liquor from a spigot hidden in its works: Aqua Vitae from the sun; cognac from Mercury; Mead from Venus; water from the moon; From Mars, vermouth; from Jupiter, chablis; From Saturn, bitter brew or sour wine. He spent six months in Stuttgart Attempting to convince the court This monument was worth a ruler's time and coin. A blind hand gropes for the handle of truth's door. Empty chatter echoes down unlit halls. There is a pleasure in retracing the detours Of Kepler's journey, a certain calmness In the counting of each mad step. The round world had no edge. America was China to him. Ariadne's thread led him back through light's labyrinth. His perfect crystal heart beat out a perfect chord For all his imaginary shapes to dance to. A restless sleeper awake inside a dream Where nature, man and God were one, He was a priest in the Pythagorean brotherhood, An acolyte of the sun who knew the game of signatures. He could decipher names in nature's script None had read for twice a thousand years. He sought out Tycho's eyes to verify The words his own voice spoke. Did the planets dance to the sounds he dreamed? He boasted he could puzzle out Mar's orbit in eight days. Eight years later, everything he'd seen gave way
To an answer he had not wanted to believe. God, cutting obliquely through a cone, Spun every perfect circle into a warped ellipse, The sun, one focus; the center, empty space. Mars and all the planets stuttered round Now fast, now slow sweeping out From their un-kiltered center equal areas in equal times. Kepler came to this with his naked eye, An armillary sphere, Brahe's purloined notes And a wild surmise purified in the crucible of sense, Made magical by nine hundred pages of equations. Intransigent, back-pedaling Mars no longer defied Man's sight. The Earth as seen from space, In Kepler's imagination yielded up its answers: There is a force inside the sun that moves the planets. Disguised truth, so often rejected, returned stealthily By the back door to banish Ptolemy and Copernicus From the new-framed world. Their equants, Eccentrics, deferents and all their interlocking spheres Disappeared from the Eden of the sky. With his pen's sharp edge, Kepler calculated Curves in space that were themselves their only cause. He synchronized his myth to what he saw. Listening hard, he turned his head to hear A winged messenger trouble calm, Italian air. When word came of one Paduan's discoveries, Star-struck Kepler's heart beat faster. He knew Galileo's magic scepter was a ladder
To scale the walls of heaven, A woven net to haul the secrets of the sky Down to our lonely planet's shores. The visible stars of the Milky Way Made room for myriad unseen suns. Jupiter had companions. When sighted Through this optical reed the solar surface Was blemished by black spots, Mountains cast their shadows on the moon. Aristotle's satellite, haloed within by a blue As blue as lapis, had been a luminous, ethereal star. The moon's disk gleamed now With a different fire to shape her cheek and brow Into a distinct visage for earth-bound eyes. Galileo, wand in hand, became a kind of Mercury Delineating precipice from crater, crevasse From cliff, lunar sea from enclosed plateau. He led men's souls across a Lethe made navigable By lenses no one else could grind. Quick to seek the Imperial Mathematician's Imprimatur for his books, Galileo Refused to send him a telescope. He would not give a colleague a competitive edge, Though to curry favor across Europe He had gifted scores of noblemen With crafted glass. He had to hedge. Galileo held the cosmic mystery in his fist And failed to understand. There is no record He read a word of Kepler's works; no evidence He recognized the verity of his laws.
In Prague, one raucous Sunday, Kepler borrowed A glimpse of heaven through an eyepiece Galileo had given the Elector of Cologne. Though he was the star messenger's first champion Kepler received no answers to his letters Except encoded messages describing new discoveries. Puzzled, he informed Galileo an honest German Deserved prompter solutions to vain conundrums. In 1610, all contact between them abruptly ends. The north wind blew our magus a more constant music. The Hermes of contests translates into the lady of arrows. Her neighbors claimed Kepler's bearded mother Summoned nameless ghosts, rode calves to death, Passed through locked rooms to bring houses Down on helpless heads. They said she fashioned From her father's skull a drinking goblet for her son And brewed in her charmed pot the dragon's tea That caused the pain that killed their daughters. Was it surprising his nurse and guardian should be An artificer of day and night, a close contriver, A Circe to Selena, a Medea to Hecate? She brought laurel, bay leaves and a fine, red wool To wreathe her cauldron and cast her spell. She scattered burnt barley like the dust of bones And melted wax as her dog howled its greetings To a goddess at the spot where three roads met. A bronze bell sounded; winds were tied; Waves, confounded; the sea, silent. She spilled red wine three times,
Unleashed bound horses once more over still waters. As the attendant stars road night's slow spiral, She bid the bright-throned moon farewell And climbed past hell's abyss straight to heaven's gate. Unshelled chestnuts fell from her aproned lap The day the provost rustled her from her house In an oaken chest to keep the locals from immolating A reputed witch. Kepler came home to defend her. After years of charge and countercharge When confronted by the instruments of torture She did not cry out, having wept so many tears Her whole life long she had none left to shed. She told them though they pluck each artery From every limb, she'd not confess to false accusers. Acquitted before the court's, if not her neighbors' eyes She journeyed back with her vagabond son to Austria Where she died, unburnt, six months thereafter. Her child's mind smoldered in different fire. Cicero went to Africa to dream. Plato conjured All Atlantis from an ocean. Plutarch strung Phantom Greenlands and changeling Labradors Into an unreal island chain. Is it surprising Descartes Mapped the kingdoms inside each snowflake's shape Or that Kepler imagined a spirit-journey to the moon? As if on a ladder to a hive of souls, he opened His heart to the dark so he and all his demons Could climb the cone of shade an eclipse cast. As a cork at net's edge rides the surge undrenched By brine so Kepler in his sleep was kept afloat.
He pulled his fisherman's haul past breakers To a beach where at last he glimpsed Through empty waves the rushlight of his final law. The sun, declining from zenith to nadir, Spread its arms in sweeping arcs To usher the dependent planets on their way. Through a surfeit of starshine Kepler clocked Each ancient nomad across an ageless sky. He found The square of the duration of each rock's journey Was equal to the cube of its distance from our central star. He answered a question only he could ask. On the road to Frankfurt to sell his newly printed book, The fever he fled his whole life long caught up with him. The sun died in its heaven. The moon waned Into its gloom. His eyes rose skyward once, Whose bones sleep beneath restless earth. Who measured the circuit of the stars Paces the darkness. A perfect symmetry of dreams Was inscribed within the nautilus of his skull. Untethered from the shores of light he casts His sky-forged anchor, for the last time, Into orchestrated nature's black, eternal depths
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RenĂŠ Descartes Body of honey in a night of bees, Seems sweet to the sleeper as he dreams. A whirlwind rules the world without; A demon rules the world within: Self is the echo of a doubt. What path Should he follow? What life should he live? Sheltered from the world and all its wars Descartes listens for an answer in a stove-warmed room; Discovers nothing, except a silence inside a solitude. As if the crowd at Babel had thrown the tower down And dug a tunnel to a necropolis of souls He will reduce his world to its foundations, Will build from pluralities of jargon, a unity Of thought and so transmute cold lead to golden ore. The customs of men, the virtues of plants, The motions of stars are no more altered by his words Than sunlight is by what it shines upon. God's ghost recedes and the spirit of truth Takes the Creator's place. At last, all nature's doors Are open to Descartes' reasoning mind. A blacksmith forging shackles for himself, Or a navigator in a storm whose broken compass Suddenly swings north; Hercules at his crossroad Or Odysseus at his palace door, Descartes opens The volume of his soul wherein each reader Will find a method for the mind to track
A lonely path between the void and God. Were the dreams he describes The dreams as he dreamed them? He fixes their images in the chemicals of memory And, like a detective, looks for clues. In a courtyard at the College de La Fleche He searches for the certainty he's missed. Phantoms force themselves against him. His right side is so weak he must turn sideways To force himself to go forward. A wind pivots him On his left foot in a dizzy spiral Toward an entranceway he cannot reach. Fearing he might fall with any step he seeks refuge In the college chapel but can hardly move. The image of a man appears before him. Descartes extends no greeting but when he hesitates As if to pay his respects, the risen wind drives Him closer to the chapel door, he sees In the middle distance another figure Who says there is a Monsieur N. waiting With a gift: strange, round fruit From a foreign land. Suddenly, he is surrounded By a familiar crowd all standing tall And firm on their feet. He is stooped and dodders As if on the crumbling edge of a precipice. A stab of unimagined pain wakes him To the realization a jinn has seduced him. He prays for God to preserve him from the evils
Of his dream. There is nothing God can do Except sort out bad from good and hurl down Thunderbolts on unregenerate sinner's heads. Descartes knows his own dreams prove him guilty However innocent he may look in other's eyes. After hours brooding on the good and evil of this world He returns to sleep only to be shocked awake By a thunderclap. His room is full of dancing flames, Angels' swords or demons' tongues or bright points Whirling within the confines of his eyes. He blinks and they're still there. If what he sees Is outside himself and real then he can read them Only as a threat from an angry God. If what he sees is inside his mind Then a curtain falls over all the objects in his world. Can his thoughts color everything? To test the theory his dreams are his own He opens and closes his eyes again and again. He finds each spark is painted On the lidded lenses of his mind. He's in control and can sleep with the kind Of calm only a rationalist can know. What his dreams lose in mystery they regain In clarity. What's divine does not intrude Into the world as easily as his delusions do. His third dream now begins with no frightening Edge at all. He finds the courage an explorer needs. His self-assurance springs from fear's foundations So that even as he sleeps, he can interpret what he dreams.
The dictionary at his elbow that comes and goes Is something he can use, a compendium Of all the things a man may know. The anthology of poems he thumbs through Represents philosophy's words wed to a music Only intellect can hear, for latent In the minds of men like sparks of flame In an unstruck flint the seeds of wisdom Wait to flare and bloom. The poem He sees first and the one a stranger recommends Are messages meant just for him. Good advice for the task at hand: No life without discomfort, no path Without obstructions, no hollows, no projections. Complete and self-contained, boundlessly finite, Infinitely limited, smooth as a globe Descartes Sits in lucid judgement on himself Pondering the difference between yes and no. When he wakes he continues to analyze His present, his future and his past. The strange, round fruit the stranger brought to him Represents the charms of solitude. The wind Pushing him toward the chapel is the demon He must vanquish to find God. The thunderclap is the voice of truth That takes his breath as a possession So that every sound he mouths is its own echo. Armed, at last, with the discoveries of sleep Descartes is ready for the journey he must make From sealed room to un-extended ego and beyond.
Unlike the curious who scavenge For discarded treasures they never find And unlike dark dwellers who have lost The use of their eyes Descartes sees His best direction. He begins with simple, Self-evident things: the cadence of breath, The rhythm of thought. Each intuition, One link of many in a chain of deductions. One thinks. One exists. A triangle Is bounded by just three sides; A sphere, by a single surface. His mind moves Step by step to a comprehensible complexity At the threshold of faith. There, When his experience admits A greater perfection than he can claim, He makes his first discovery. As a river Of stars flowing above a steeple Cleanses the dark in the moon's absence So Descartes' words take wing With the wayward planets Through heaven's circling houses To sound the triumph of the birth of God. As mountains have valleys; As the sea, a shore, the mind must have Its architect. If each thought confirms There is a thinker then his existence Begs the question of all creation. God is nature and nature, God: The effect is like the cause. Brick by brick Descartes rebuilds the world.
His body can come back and with it The deceptive senses, though the evidence They bear must be proved in reason's crucible. Having tasted the tree's fruit, Descartes becomes his own constructor. He looks past the world's disguises To the geometry implicit within immortal eyes. Born to eat the simplest bread, he toils To bring forth thistles from the dust. As a surgeon subdues affection Before treating a patient he might not save Descartes disenchants his dream. His gaze abstracts awe from heaven. His hands lift love's veil to reveal A skull beneath his beloved's face. The fivefold bond that fetters other men No longer tethers him. He holds a cow's heart To his ear to listen for his own blood's echo, Triangulates the sunlight a million watery prisms Refract into a rainbow, knows a snowflake's Unique symmetry might not taste the same to every tongue. Can he sense what the world would look like To an angel? Or is his mind a stunted ghost Locked inside a gland? Is he a thinking thing, An embodied creature or a brute machine Without a dream? At just that point Where intellect meets body, Descartes' thought Dissolves into a dissonance of shape and space. Like a hanged man hovering in air,
Soul inhabits body as weight pervades the limbs. Only a geometer perceives the world For what it is: a whirling sea Of measurable bits, quanta without qualities. Descartes sees nothing but the web The spider spins. The red of a rose Is inside him and not intrinsic to the flower. Tomorrow, in his eyes, a marigold May be a violet or a sparrow, a canary. He cuts the tapered end of a dog's heart To test with his fingertip the living strength Of each contraction. When no more blood can exit From the beast, whose life is forfeit To Descartes' careful knife, its work is done. Diligent as a bee amidst flowers on a rocky slope Descartes flies on perfectly transparent wings Through a world inhabited by machines that purr And wind-up dolls that breed. Dismembered Fragments fuse within the furnace of his intellect Mutating barnyard creature into herds Of griffins, minotaurs and chimeras no evil Can eviscerate or slaughtered innocence appease. The eternal silence of infinite space Does not frighten him. He finds peace In mortal wisdom. The wax from the honeycomb Is hard, heavy with the scent of ravished flowers Until fire changes it from what it was, To a translucent, odorless liquid just as surely Wax as he is the Descartes he used to be
When he soldiered for Prince Maurice of Orange. We cannot know the terror he felt he must Be sheltered from. Unafraid of iron shot Or swift thrusts of steel, he could not abide Galileo's censure by the Church. Everything he'd written until that time He cast aside for fear the Pope would interdict His vision of a spinning, circling world And so force him to dismantle for a second time All he'd built from his physics down to his first doubt. This is the Descartes we must not judge Who rearranged the patterns of his thought And killed the courage a soldier needs To make way for a world he could not change. He lives well who lives well out of it. Masked as an actor he mounts the stage To mime these truths before a Rosicrucian crowd. He spent his last winter teaching manners To a cold king's daughter who forced him From his bed each Swedish dawn So he might greet the harvester of men That much sooner. A healthy man Is a clock that knows the time it tells, A creature who when thirsty drinks When hungry eats, when unsatisfied Dreams itself a feast. Descartes, Having lain abed 'til noon his whole life long, Must have known he never should have risen To teach that girl her lessons. In laughter, he finds sadness; in tears, joy:
For meaning resides not in the sign But in the mind. In death, at last, The world's great book swings wide for him. Out of the perfect circle of his repose Came a new way of shaping space; A path past Euclid's where tranquil Parallelograms made peace with motion. As a bird flies from branch to branch He flew from calculation to calculation Until he grew tired of mathematics. The answers to the problems Descartes posed Are in the questions he never asked. Like Kepler's feverish infant son His own child died before the age of five. An illegitimate, much doted on daughter, She was an inhabitant of a world he'd lost, An emblem of the grief he couldn't bear The final proof of what was wrought inside his skull When nature forged for him a self distinct From the no man's land he'd dreamed. Freed from the confines of oracular sleep, He elaborates a future for mankind. As moonbeams smooth each child's arrival, Age wine, nurture plants, season timber, Return cadavers to their ashes, Natural light leads him deeper and deeper Into the mirrored labyrinth Of icy reasons infinite reflection.
Sir Isaac Newton Jewels of light fall from the heights of heaven; Minerals ripen deep within earth: Petra genetrix, matrix mundi Knife blade is wife; cutting-edge, husband. This stone, son; this one, daughter. Breathe again the way you breathed In your mother's womb. Dragon and tiger speak. Mercury moves with sulfur. O, happy child Of science; O, golden son of leaden parents, Fortunate Newton, strong, certain and alone, The emeralds of your mind Are caught in oblivion's sieve. Sable, two shin bones saltire-wise, Sinister surmounted by a dexter argent. Is mankind never satisfied? Is there a vision worth the effort At the end of each beings' journey Or must we settle for the world Albion's skinny genius has devised? Only a second Newton can plot the machinations Of the first. Helpless in the hands of his own demon He dreamed a better dream than others had Before him. He plumbed the mind of God, Paced out an eternal plan for all creation, Thought on things continuously, until, Swift sails hoist for the new,
He left Aristotelian shores behind. Laid long enough in the earth Any metal is gold in potentia Silver quickens in blood-red moonlight, Mercury runs beneath the sun's bright fire, Venus births copper's ore, Mars smelts iron, Jupiter forges bolts of tin, Saturn tempers lead. Gold is the child of earth's desire; The aftermath of soil and star shines mating. Dismembered limbs reassemble. A serpent thrashes through cresting waves. Torture separates; water mingles. Spirit rises Into shape. Redemption frees the lithic mythology Implicit in each clump of confused earth. Newton knew the fields of cinnabar And the mountains of the secret sea. In the thumb-sized space both round and square Within the recesses of his brain, He nurtured the embryo of immortality. The heterodox world was one to him. The fire in his kitchen hearth indistinguishable From the conflagration inside the sun; His breath, the same as any beasts; The heritage of travertine no different From New England shale. In his eyes Light returned from Martian mountains Reflects off Venus' mirror just as well.
Angels move to the tempo of his hammer blows. Winged hierarchs fall and are no more. Ignorant Abbadon relinquishes his weapons To the dust. Each link in the great chain of being Is sundered, melted down and cast anew. As Plato's solids nest in Kepler's cup, color Coincides with tone. Spectrum and scale Are one. A many-headed serpent sleeps Inside Ecbatana's final wall. Pythagoras sings, plucking a monochord. Lege, lege, lege, relege, work And it will come: Christ the animate stone, Rises from mute nature to change The substance of what is. A shadow, Crowned by a benzene ring, feasts on shadows. A serpent bites its tail. Each image, A clue to night's enigmas. A grammar Of glances elucidates a gnomon's grace. Despite its never-ending circuit there is In Mercury's orbit a perturbation Even Newton could not comprehend. Steps to the rainbow, ladders to the bridge, Derivatives mutate to integrals and back again. Square roots pursue infinitesimals. The geometry of motion in multi-dimensions Expands from nothing and collapses back to null. Departed quantities resurrect and reel To the music of their maker's will. A mathematician with his eyes closed, Newton moves sets of points along families
Of related curves until the rhythm of irrationals Makes sense to him. Fluxion of a fluxion, Ghost of a ghost, zero and not zero: You will know the lion by his claws. In Grantham, he excelled in the construction Of gewgaws, whirligigs and other curious devices. He left nothing much behind except his initials On a schoolhouse windowsill, a woman He might have loved and a well annotated library Of theological works in an apothecary's attic. From Lincolnshire he came to Cambridge With a lock, a bottle -- ink to fill it -A commonplace book, a pound of candles And a chamber pot. As subsizar, petty usurer, And secret Unitarian, he pursued elusive symmetries, Saw his way around each corner, negated Each obstacle until his own ends were achieved. As Lucasian professor he mumbled out his lectures To empty pews. No one knew the Newton yet to come. Halley kept insisting he put it all on paper. Nothing moved him until Hook’s deft hand plucked A shaft of lightning from the hidden quiver Of the fragmentary, as yet untitled, masterpiece. Unforecast clouds obscure A perfectly predictable eclipse. Steeped in the substance of his dreams He weighs the evidence of things unseen To calculate the force of water and to clock, By Jupiter's missing moons, the insistent beat Of absolute duration. He hatches from Galileo's
Golden egg a new science of dynamics, Wrestles Descartes' vortex from the sky, Tracks the image of his father in the stars And lays his mother's jeweled crucifix On the brow of an all-pervasive deity Whose electric and elastic spirit Dances to demonstrable laws. Eternity reveals eternity. Infinity blossoms From infinity. Time is equable though Nothing made can measure such perfection. Space is everywhere immovable. Stillness insists on stillness; motion, on motion. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Each body's changing rate of speed Is a gauge of implicit, animating force. Cumulative simplicity destroys a universe. From these ruins Newton builds his edifice. Do dancers sway or are they swayed? Earth and moon, blood relatives, wheel Around a common center. Movement around And movement forward are one. In our world Each body embraces every other in proportion To the product of their masses and inversely To the square of the distance between their centers. The calm occurrences of night defeat The final sapphire light of day. I chart Newton's voyage across an immeasurable, Dark abyss, his eyes on lookout For the fatal star, his fingers spinning
Embodied silhouettes. Ether is the food Of planets; its density increases from the Sun To Saturn and beyond. The universe is shaped By choice and not by chance. A very real angel Moves within him and a face, like Newton's own, Stares back from the fire inside the sun. God is the system wherein all things find their place; Space, the divine sensorium. Within the dark Of Newton's cold machine is a womb To birth new creatures for our dreams. The fruit he watched fall bears no resemblance To the fruit he gathers. A magus transforms The things he touches, so he reaches for nothing He would not change for fear the energy His fingertips release might unleash a demon He cannot tame. Constant philosopher of fire, Betrayed by the vapors of boiling metal He harvests all the irritable blessings Herme's crucible has to offer. Memory flees him. Sleep is defeated. He vents poison on innocents; Detects evil intent in the actions Of guileless friends. Agent for a double-dealing God, he bites each coin twice; Will draw and quarter counterfeiters; Badger dabblers to distraction; Bludgeon Flamsteed and bully Halley. Translated to a corpulent eminence Inside a sedan chair he knows The streets his porters navigate
Are nothing like the shores his mind scavenged For smoother pebbles or prettier shells. From quart pot to final bed he extends In all directions. A surgeon of sunlight he dissects A single beam into uncompounded color. A silver mirror's achromatic image leaps inside his eye. He sees what no vulture ever could: A fire in the center of the frost, A salamander unconsumed by flames, A serpent fed on coals. The moon Brides the yellow man to breed beneath earth Her seeds of gold. A strange blood comes From the Shulamite's split skin. Christ, the hermaphrodite, lances bread, Squares the trinity, deceives Eve For the last time, reduces Adam Back to ashes. Man is the bait. Flint and steel strike. Man is the tinder. Isis is the dew, the calm water. Isis dressed in deepest black, a lethal mother. Her body, as fragile as glass, Shines like a prism in sunlight, Alive with the color of air, a sapphire Flower, a fountain of frozen blood, An integration of evil and good. She whispers, Wash me, make me see; Help me separate the captive from the called; Help me tell the chosen from the free. A woman asleep inside a flower Dreams of a man dreaming of a woman. Take nothing by word. He said his theory
Was evinced not by inferring 'tis thus because not otherwise But because he derived it from experiments Concluded positively and directly. His aim was not to measure an eel's length Or to count the mites in cheese But to see deeper into nature's well, to bless The blue of plums and the green of leaves. There is no royal road, no one reality. A mind only gradually gains ground on darkness. Cost and recompense are never equal. The void will swallow everything. What a blaze there is while our eyes are open. There is no end of fancying though we frame No hypothesis but his: men must end Their own desire to search in vain For explanation not why but how A certain most subtle spirit pervades infinity. A thief liberates the law of spring. Strangers' fingers filch his sun-crowned Seven-petaled flower to adorn another's cap. What can he do but unhinge Hooke and rail At Leibniz’s folly. Priority alone is not enough. Adrift in being's sea he tries to catch The moon he's beckoned down. Lost in emptiness each planet wanders back To its beginning, kindle-coal for Newton's dreams. Nature has no limits; no insuperable aberrations. He plumbs the shape of night And grapples by weight of law Aristotle's heaven to our earth. There was
Only the one world for him to comprehend. Once its secrets yielded to his mind All science died to be reminted in Daniel's den By trumpet's summons. He lifts, From desiccated fingers, graven clay. The eater is the meat; sweet Can only come from strong. As the strain, so the force. His friends Are not as close as his enemies are. Mimics and proselytizers grind their mirrors Ever smoother to bear witness to the changes The spinning planets weave on the sun's secret loom. A cloud of dust condenses into fire. Sheathed In dismal steel, Locke works his wiles; Newton, his waterwheel. Intellect and desire are one. Condemned to understand masterless nature, Neither black nor white, neither mercury Nor sulfur, the marble index of his mind Now navigates some other sea. Each traveler Tracks his own lost road back to its beginning. An innocent serpent sheds dry tears.
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