Edited by Dava Sobel That we need the sky to tell us we don’t matter is why, before totality, we are so giddy and akimbo. In its random masking, how shall the Sun disclose its other light? (We’ve not seen before.) And strange air, dark and gray and silver and soft and very precise, emerges to pool around every pore and shiver of skin. Beneath our breathy hollers, a river runs dark, sprays of pebble -leaping riffles instantly aloft: Corona crowns the south: Hole edged with brimming sprays of light! What is metaphor but secular alchemy? Black flat sphere five degrees off the ecliptic else each month we’d see totality, normal as a door, common as a starling. Above the Little Lost River, above the valley and its ranges, above thrall, dumb totality. And the Moon slips away, unseen, three millimeters monthly and so on etcetera till its visage will shirk this scene. Orbits bloat. Eclipses are happenstance. Like us, they’ll go extinct, the Moon to be debris someday, a lovely ring around a dead Earth. But, ah, among the living: Crickets at noon and humans hooting with an owl, looking for a gopher or at the light around the Moon: Pink crust of flares like fire mountains, like sleep to rub from the Cyclops’s eye before his hot day at the forge. There is light around the Moon: White corona, a hand of streaming cilia that warns and beckons. The rim brightens, and fact makes terror wonderful.
That we need the sky to tell us we don’t matter is why, before totality, we are so giddy and akimbo. In its random masking, how shall the Sun disclose its other light? (We’ve not seen before.) And strange air, dark and gray and silver and soft and very precise, emerges to pool around every pore and shiver of skin. Beneath our breathy hollers, a river runs dark, sprays of pebble -leaping riffles instantly aloft: Corona crowns the south: Hole edged with brimming sprays of light! What is metaphor but secular alchemy? Black flat sphere five degrees off the ecliptic else each month we’d see totality, normal as a door, common as a starling. Above the Little Lost River, above the valley and its ranges, above thrall, dumb totality. And the Moon slips away, unseen, three millimeters monthly and so on etcetera till its visage will shirk this scene. Orbits bloat. Eclipses are happenstance. Like us, they’ll go extinct, the Moon to be debris someday, a lovely ring around a dead Earth. But, ah, among the living: Crickets at noon and humans hooting with an owl, looking for a gopher or at the light around the Moon: Pink crust of flares like fire mountains, like sleep to rub from the Cyclops’s eye before his hot day at the forge. There is light around the Moon: White corona, a hand of streaming cilia that warns and beckons. The rim brightens, and fact makes terror wonderful.
