…we are kin to stars
posted on December 12, 2009 at 10:36 am by Khali
I’ve been reading a book called ‘Ahab’s Wife’ by Sena Jeter Naslund. I’ve been entranced by the language in the book and I can’t seem to put the thing down. Here’s a passage from p558 of my copy, and you’ll see what I mean about the language. The whole book is line one giant poem. I bought it on a whim, because I am a fan of Melville’s Moby Dick and I wanted to see what this woman had done with a character that is mentioned in maybe two lines of Moby. I am not disappointed.
There is a great journey yet to be taken. Let my mind be a ship that sails from starry point to starry point. In my brain, I feel those cold black spaces containing nothing. I approach a pinprick of light closer and closer till it is a conflagration of such magnitude that I am nothing. And yet with my mind I caliper it with contemplation.
Where is my place before this whirling ball of star mass, edgeless and expansive, without horizon? Where is my place, when I know that this is but one of ten billion? Here the categories crack. Beauty -that gilt frame - burns at its edges and falls to ash. Love? It’s no more than a blade of grass. Perhaps there is music here, for in all that swirling perhaps harmony fixes the giants in thier turning, marches them always outward in thier fiery parade.
That I can see thier glory, that is my place. That I have these moments to be alive - and surely they are alive in some other way. Perhaps it is only being that we share. But something is shared between me on the rooftop and them flung wideand myriad up there. What was the golden motto emroidered on the hem of my baby’s silk dress? We are kin to stars.
I reach my hands toward them, spread my fingers and see those diamonds in the black v’s between my fanning fingers. To think I could gather them into my hands, stuff them in my pockets, is folly. But I can reach. it is I myself, alive now, who reach into the night toward stars. Thier light is on my hands.
Thier light is in my hands. I gasp in the crisp air of earth and know that I am made of what makes stars! Those atoms burning bright - I lower my hands - why, they are here within me. I am as old as they and will continue as long as they, and after our demise, we will all be born again, eons from now. What atoms they have I cannot know. I cannot call thier names, but htey are not strangers to me. I know them in my being, and they know me.
Little scrap, little morsel, the stars sing to me, we are the same.
I’m sad I’m almost done!
