The Various Sizes Of The World / William Bronk
Review by Orna Gadish
We all get used to the regular stars in time.
After the start of learning how far they are,
what distances from earth, and even more
what space they keep apart from star to star,
where centuries divide the closest star's faint light
from light beyond, the mind comes back at last
making the sky seem shallow like the earth
where, from the air, we see a city's lights
spread out across the surface crust below
in constellations we read without surprise.
The sky is a similar surface pierced with lights
until, another morning, the sensitive plate
of a telescope has fixed a light so far
we never knew, so huge that a galaxy needs
to hold it. What address ever really finds
us in the endless depths the world acquires?
The earth has mass to hold our own mass down,
and the huge sun holds earth as though
a whirled cord were taut with it. But the mind
responds to the pull of its own gravities
The mind is shifted outward into space beyond the sun, where the surface sky explodes softly forever like an endless wind. Out and back the mind, the slide of the rule. Where shall we add the logarithm of what to find the actual product of any hour? What point can fix the decimal of space that joins the least remoteness of the earth by tiny increments to the last star? No, here's an incongruous world, too large, too far
