Dark Skies

When I was around 9 or 10 my dad built a powerful telescope with mirrors and lens and a big tube that he got at a scientific company in New Jersey. We looked at reddish Mars, saw the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, comets, and constellations.

Then in the early 70s Baltimore installed sodium-vapor streetlights. The skies turned orange. The stars were hidden.

Today, if you live in or near a city, you probably rarely see a star-filled sky. You might see Venus and a few other very bright bodies from time to time but how often do you really see the stars? Some people, I imagine, have never truly seen them.

This week we chanced upon Copper Breaks State Park near Quanah, Texas. Copper Breaks is what is known as a Dark Sky Park. There are no artificial lights in the park and if you happen to be there on a clear, moonless night, as we were, you can see a skyful. We pulled in at about 4 p.m. and snagged a campsite for $18.

I arose in the middle of the night (as I am wont to do) and was able to see in stunning clarity, the Ursalas major and minor, the North Star, Queen Cassiopeia reclining on her throne, and Orion with his three notched belt. The constellations, which the ancient ones imagined were gods, acting out their cosmic destinies, on the night stage.

To see a sky full of lights from sources hundreds of millions of light years away, especially after having not seen them for months or years, is to be reduced to little but awe. The stunning insignificance or our existence in contrast to the magnificent significance of our consciousness. For unlike the ancients, we know what stars are. We know we came from there.

Astronomy

Before they installed the sodium vapors,

my father carried the telescope he had made

to the backyard and peered through the lens.

We saw Mars, a sanguine fruit,

Saturn, debris bangles jangling,

fat super ball Jupiter,

and nebulae whose light began its journey

a hundred million years ago.

All of this came from there, he told me.

A handful of hydrogen, iron, and carbon.

When orange overcame the sky,

they vanished, snubbed relations. I forgot them until,

waking in darkness on Mt. Nemrut,

I glimpsed his meaning.

Eyes, brilliant and shining,

my father said, hold everything.

There is nothing

that does not belong to the stars.