Dick Westheimer
What I Should Have Said on a Dark Sky Excursion with My High School Physics Teacher
in memory of David Laird
The cool kids thought David was a dork,
bucktoothed and meeting us at the door
of his classroom, his lab coat buttoned to the neck,
his brow-line glasses, coke-bottle-thick,
perched on the beak of his nose. His blackboard
bloomed with formulas and tracks
of point-plots and sketches showing planetary
motion in formulas and lines, with explanatory
notes, flow charts and graphs—he was
a preacher possessed, his religion and cause:
the gods of gravity & maths. I was a parishioner
transported, him talking in tongues, me under
the spell of such things. But mostly, his whole being
teemed with stars and how they precessed. He let me see
what he saw, deep sky dreams by day then going out with him
under the sequined night. He’d find a place wholly dimmed
of city lights, free of smog and haze. We’d set up our scopes
and note exactly the moment when a star would pass so close
to the mountains of the moon that we’d see it graze,
pulse off and on like a lighthouse beam. We’d take surveys
for NASA noted in 10 hertz time. Such joy when this good work
was done. We packed up all but our scopes and the astronomer/
teacher pointed up and smiled, We’ve one more treat, Mars, he said.
I went to my eyepiece and he to his and there as if on a thread
the red planet slid into sight, then closer—like an old old friend—
leaned in and then it was quickly hidden from view as if to spend
some time alone before emerging from behind the half
lit moon. I felt so large and small at once, gasped
at the thought of these orbs themselves, dwelling in that
emptiness so full of light and dark, a realm
that, with my basement-made scope, I visited as much as it was
visited on me. I, illuminated by more than the lunar light,
paused and said, quiet as I should under the spangled spell of stars,
Thank you.