The Asking
for Rebecca Elson (1960–1999), astronomer and poet
Lost at sea, I did not pray.
I looked up.
The stars do not care
whether you find them useful.
That is what I love about them.
The iron in my blood
was made in a violence
I have no name for.
It crossed three billion years
to end up here,
carrying oxygen to these particular thoughts
in this particular dark.
Consider that.
I have been lost in the wilderness
where the trees repeat themselves
each turn arriving
at the same clearing.
I looked up.
Not for guidance exactly —
the stars are not a map,
they are a fact,
and the fact is this:
you are already made of the thing
you thought you were seeking.
I have been lost in the desert
where my shadow at noon
was the only dark available,
and I did lie down in it,
and I looked up,
and I thought:
the light arriving now
left its source
before I was a thought,
before the carbon was assembled
into whatever this is
that doubts and hungers —
and I was not comforted exactly
but I was
repositioned.
This is my religion:
that matter,
given enough pressure and time,
wakes up.
That somewhere in the forging
of iron in a dying star
the universe began
practicing
for us.
That what came out of the supernovae —
all that gorgeous debris —
arranged itself eventually
into something that could ask
why.
The asking is the thing.
Not the answer.
The asking.
Sometimes it is enough
to lie here in the wilderness,
the sea, the sand,
in whatever lostness
has found me this season,
and know that the dark overhead
is not empty
but full
of what we cannot yet see —
that I am inferred
the way dark matter is inferred,
by the way other things
move around me,
that even unconstrained by form
I was already here,
in the first warm scatter
of things becoming things.
We are a window.
Briefly.
The universe
looking at itself
and finding it
has questions.
