When Galilean Moons Occult

Once you learned how to bend the light
To get more in your eyes, you were
Finally off and on your way,
No longer mere monkeys in trees.

No longer mere bipeds in grass,
You’d learned how to use your numbers
And languages for prosthetic
Purposes, and robotic craft

Photographing Jupiter’s moons
Were close to forgone conclusions.
So you learned you weren’t the center
Of the universe. Well, oh well.

You’re not even centered as you—
You and your words rotate around
Your torsos’ thumping and burbling,
Linked, orbiting, dependent moons

Locked to your microbes’ gas giants,
Asymmetrically regular
As all periodicities
Seem to turn out in this cosmos,

Elliptical, not circular,
Gravity hauling everything
Down to everything else, and yet,
Exact centers rather emptied.

It’s a skew-whiff world, which allows
For all kinds of eccentric frames,
All scales of framing devices,
From telescopes to microscopes,

To thought experiments on trains,
To atom smashers underground,
To continent-spanning lenses,
To mental shifts in perspective.

If you’re trying to frame the cosmos,
It’s hopeless. You’ve nowhere to stand.
But anything less than the whole
You can zoom in on to expand.

If your frame is all of culture,
Then writing’s just a chunk of it.
If your frame is all of writing,
Then poetry’s small bits of it.

But shrink your frame to, say, lyric,
Then maybe there’s something in this.
Even moons in pools collect light
Animalcules occult at night.