The Obseveratory on a Partly Cloudy Night by Edison Angelbello

The Observatory on a Partly Cloudy Night

by Edison Angelbello

I came to see Saturn’s rings, but that is, apparently, the clouded part the weatherman mentioned. So I am standing here watching this cluster of stars the resident astronomer says are thousands of light years away.

I’m looking not at present but at past— at a two, three, four thousand-year old dusty film reel developed diligently over the millennia it took to get from another galaxy to the lens on this telescope and into my eye. That cluster could already be dead, one man says, the stars could have exploded hundreds of years ago and we might not know for a few hundred more.

I remember how we agreed one night as your boat cut through the waves on the Intracoastal that maybe we’d end up together and that maybe we wouldn’t.

And I wonder how long I will wait, one eye pressed to the telescope, for some kind of proof— either that they were lost centuries ago or that they are still there, that this image of two stars pulsing next to one another isn’t fiction or mythology or history quite yet.