Gathering his smooth bones,
...while stroking the feathers of his dark familiar cockerel,
Johannes Kepler was trying to discover
And Isaac Newton, wizard,
beneath the deluge of modern information,
he walks about the tower
in a mantle of shadows
black on black.
John Napier, the Marvelous magician of Merchiston Castle
invented logarithms,
created the decimal point
and
wrote mad prophecy, dreamed of
burning mirrors, melding mathematics and magic which
in the 16th century didn't seem so mad;
everything could be magical then,
they didn't have all these
things.
the interlocking secrets of universe
so he could hear the song of the planets, the sidereal harmony;
the laws of celestial motion were a convenient
accidental
byproduct
of his starry fascination.
Newton who nearly poisoned himself tasting
his alchemical concoctions of mercury, antimony, mystery,
Newton with his indecipherable scrawls of
Green Lion and Babylonian Dragon and Doves of Diana
he was seeking prisca sapientia, the wisdom of the ancients
dreaming Solomon the mage-king as the greatest philosopher
yes, Newton was the last soul who would have wanted this
mechanical
magickless
"scientific"
world.
beneath sterile laboratories of chrome and beneath circuitry of silicon,
all this wonder still lies: our modern worldview was crafted by
sorcerers, inspired by
beauty
mystery
fascination,
a heart of magic.
Johannes Kepler writes the Harmonice Mundi while his mother lies in chains.
There is a worm in the middle finger of my right hand.
Mother she left her thumb in the rack
left thumb in the rack
A twelve-year-old girl from the village was carrying bricks to the kiln
and was passing Mother Kepler when she felt a sudden
stabbing
pain.
Mother they carried you away
in the oak linen chest
clean linen splayed across the dirty floor
They said she asked the sexton
for the skull of her father to be cast in silver
as a drinking goblet for her son
they said she rode a calf to death
they said she cast the evil eye on the tailor’s children
they said she served poison from her innocuous tin jug
they burn six witches a winter here
Perfectly harmonious, harmoniously perfect
I am going to discover the interlocking structure
of the universe. The planets glide
If you could only hear the music they make
if I could only hear the music they make
as each
displaces the aether
a tone rises, sidereal
the sound of a projectile singing through space
Listen,
The Moon, nearby, rings so sweetly high
Saturn, the furthest, murmurs deep as he passes by.
The entire solar system is the lyre of the divine
I will uncover how the tones combine
then like Pythagoreas
like in the Golden Age
I will hear
God’s celestial melody sung.
(Thus from mystical beauty was modern science sprung)
metal scraping stone
not right
sounds of human agony
iron fork mangling breasts
crushed bones
Five intervals between the six planets.
Five perfect Platonic solids.
They must fit.
Look,
I fit geometric solids between the orbits of the planets,
cubes, dodecahedrons, tetrahedrons, octahedrons:
each a perfect geometric interval
and each equal to a musical interval on the Pythagorean scale
It all makes sense, at least to me.
When Saturn is in the aphelion the scale will be in the major key.
If Saturn is in the perihelion, it will be in the minor
key.
Pure, mathematical harmony.
Heavenly bodies spaced in the aether
cosmically, smoothly fitting together.
the machine is pulling
a woman’s flesh apart
they do not fit i am deaf here upon the earth
Mother alone and deaf in the cold stone chamber
torturers empty and deaf in their warm homes
they ring the scripture in Mother’s ears and then demand
why do you not weep why do you not shed tears you must be a witch
“i have shed so many i have none left” she cries
God is Mathematical and Mother is hurting.
I will make it right
my brothers have quibbled at the cost of the defense and given up on Mother, I alone
can make it right, I alone will come to law and order:
49 points to the accusation.
Act of Accusation
Act of Contestation
Act of Acceptation
Act of Exception and Defense
Act of Deduction and Confutation
I argue that they are inspired by the devil
(the devil rides them, the devil hides them
wicked not facing themselves)
and for the Act of Conclusion I write 128 pages by my own hand,
six years Mother you have been accused
six years of legal petitions and volumes of evidence collected by court piling up
mounds of law and order
25 years since the Mysterium Cosmographicum
I am writing the Harmonice Mundi and I will make it right
Five perfect Platonic solids.
It must cohere.
World Harmony
please make it fit i need it to fit
ripping of flesh, metal opening inside a woman’s body
nails ripped out, needles pushed into the bloody stumps
she faints and she faints, holy water again splashed in her face
perfect ratios
perfect proportions
evidencing a Cosmic Designer
Perfectly harmonious, harmoniously perfect
Cosmic Mystery, shelter me.
Inertia and the Development of the H-Bomb
I travelled a strange potion to get here.
_____________________________________
We run up against it when we try to get anywhere.
To ignore it, rather, leads to Certain death--
And breath is shallow, unfulfilled
I ran up against its fog, became heavy of limb,
I ran up against its fog and could not see.
is it like that sickness of heart or of mind that
Men conferred in sinister laboratories,
exchanging antimeaningful words over concoctions
that they judged over wafts of mists,
maroon, putrid.
They were not motivated by altruism, nor
Science, Pure;
it was personal fancy, novelty,
the color of some woman's faded dress,
the rememberance of some slight motion.
Succumbing, we let it sink into our very bones,
Not raptured. Never conceding.
but lulled, unawares, listening to ancient clocks
wind down--
Yet to follow it does not lead to the place
where the world stops.
A certain kind of death,
where motion has now meaning,
where motion is all we have, endless,
where sleep is faint, restless,
where death is in fact, deathless.
and action is mockery, unwilled
and the languor was peaceless like no morphine dream,
about as restful as being woven into spindly cobwebs
as falling into bitter quicksand;
a slow yet sure demise.
A thousand unnamed thoughts captured me,
put out my eyes, left me to grow old
and bluster forever.
It has not yet put out my ideals, but they too may be dimmed
by its wretched hand, dimmed like the light from a
farther room, not dimmed like the sun or the moon or anything quite so celestial--
keeps the world from caring? sister sicknesses,
too vague to be compared. a musty old blanket
to keep us from becoming enflamed in prayer;
we grow old and turn to dust, shedding
grains of ourselves every day, eroding, being
worn down by the lethargy-- But yet we are.