Above Us the Milky Way

by Fowzia Karimi

  witness

  The sun does not blink, nor ever avert its gaze. It looks on while the earth giddily spins and totters on its axis.

  offering

  And Mother looks at her girls and thinks, this is what I have delivered to this world.

  These girls.

  This world.

  A Thousand Tales

  The book shivers, its pages flutter.

  Count these pages, tally the dead. Before you are finished, they will have doubled. There are others, plenty. Places, plenty. The living are cut down. The dead rise. They circle.

  There are words. Not condolences. Not dirges, not blessings. Stories. Plenty. Each their own. Come, read with me, says the book.

  U

  The sisters, Mother, and Father were not bound to the earth. They lived also in the upper realms: up in the sky each night, they assembled, bright, twinkling.

  See their lids grow heavy at night; watch them close. See the rungs of the ladder glimmer in the moon’s light. Watch  them  climb;  they  are  expert. In their nightclothes, barefoot, softly they ascend, the seven. Listen to the rustle in the grandfather tree’s leaves; the same breeze clears the sky of its misty veil. Look up, as I do, at the starry archipelago.

  the three astronomers

  The early astronomer observed and calculated the distances, orbits, and motions of the planets to create a novel picture of the cosmos. He placed in the center of this system the sun, that brilliant and ever-lit lantern, so that it might illuminate all things at once. About the sun, he stationed the roving planets in concentric rings so that each might have its own smooth path to travel upon. And what order! What logic! How perfect the image of sphere within circle within circle!

  Three centuries later and in the land across the river, the reticent poet, after spending a lifetime gazing at his own image, awakened to the beauty of the stars over his head. He, both poet and maker of mirrors and other convex surfaces, was not unaware of his own beauty, equally bright and transcendent. The poet and the polisher of surfaces looked long into the sky and long into the mirror. He reevaluated the early astronomer’s calculations, drew his own diagrams, and formulated his own equations to generate a new vision, one more exquisite, more truthful than any previous: he imagined himself in the center of the great system of moving bodies; who else but man could occupy such a seat? But the poet was not long for the earth and his short romance with the stars produced only the single poem, which he recited but once. It was spoken even as it was created, traveling from his bosom to his lips in a continuous stream, beautiful. In that moment, in the dense hours of the night as he paced back and forth in front of the stove in his small apartment, he knew that everything he was, had ever been, and would be was concentrated in this single poem. And while it streamed forth, he was whole and all of life and all in the cosmos was of one piece and complete. The verse said everything that could be said, contained all that ever was and would be, and expressed it more perfectly, more beautifully, more elementally, than it ever had been expressed or would be again. But as he spoke the final verse, the poem, which had contained him and all else in it, was gone, from him, from the room, from the town. Though he labored through the night to bring it back, pacing back and forth, his hands in his hair, over his clenched, tired eyes, or gripping his ready pen at his table to set it down on paper, the poem was gone and not a solitary line was left him. In the early morning hours, the poet fell into a feverish sleep from which he did not regain consciousness.

  The poem was recited the single time and heard only once by another: by the new astronomer, the steady mathematician, that lover of integers, the poet’s own countryman, two centuries earlier in a dream. And the poem, the same one, expressed the harmony among the stars and contained the absolute truth of all things in the universe in the mathematician’s dream just as it would when the poet later recited it. And the poem, which was whole and complete and beautifully recited by the pacing poet in the mathematician’s dream, filled the scholar as he listened, and left him afterward despondent when he awoke without any trace of its rhyme, and only the echo of its beauty. So the new astronomer returned to his work and fell wholly into it as never before. But one day, while looking deeply into numbers and geometries he saw there an image of the poet from his dream. And leaving one idol for another, he revived the poet’s cause, making it his own. He found his way to a distant graveyard, to a plainly marked plot, and dug out the clean bones of one long dead: the early astronomer. In his laboratory, he worked the many hours, early and late, to take precise measurements of all the bones in the body—their lengths, circumferences, and densities—and he molded these calculations so that they fit the laws of the poet’s cosmic system, which showed man in the center of the universe. The new astronomer/mathematician took down his model of planets in elliptical orbit around the sun, a model over which he had labored for ten years. He hung in its place a new model, which consisted of the 206 bones of the dead astronomer hung by string and balanced perfectly, each bone placed so as to be in supreme harmony with every other. And the mathematician, who knew numbers and geometries and had applied them to the cosmos with great success, no longer gazed skyward but spent his days dusting the early astronomer’s bones, and listening for the poet’s verse in their sometimes dull, sometimes ringing chime.

  tender

  Yes, Father’s heart whirred like a finely tuned, smooth-running mechanism. Having many small legs and two deft wings of its own, his heart followed the trails of the little things: the ants marching up the trunks of the fruit trees; the snails inching across the cool cement patio in the early morning hours; the spiders spinning their intricate webs beneath the eaves of the house; his girls’ tentative dreams and ideas knocking against walls and slipping into dresser drawers; the squeak beneath the car’s hood; the small fissure forming in the wall behind the washing machine. Father’s heart was aware of, and friend to, the small things, the invisible things, the unobtrusive creatures, the whats and whoms others missed and stepped on or over. His was a tender heart and it listened tenderly to the new shoots that came up in his vegetable garden, to the broken wing of the disoriented bird, to the small stirrings that muted the expectant mother cat. And his sympathetic nature sharpened his daughters’ senses so they could better see in the dark and better hear, through the din of daily living, the subtle and the quiet energies.

  below

  Gentle reader, come, come! Place your eye here. Just here. Look, the earthworm wriggles, it glistens, it glides in and out of the crumbly earth. Look here, at the beetle! It has been out all day, now it shambles over the dry teetering leaves and disappears into the inky aperture in the garden wall. It takes its iridescent jewel home with it.

  rotation, revolution

  There are the fixed stars and there are the whirling stars. It is the transfixed new astronomer who sees that a need in the wandering planets causes them to turn and turn, searching outward, searching inward.

  voyage

  The stars and the planets went tumbling through the cold dark spaces, unknowing, unmoored, until caught by this or that force. What tugged the family—Mother, Father, the sisters each—this way and that way? What brought them to this destination, drew them to that port? Here is a job. On the library shelf, a book. This is your friend. Around the next corner, a wonder awaits you. What guided each: the nose, the heart, a whim? Did they make deliberate calculations before making decisions important and trivial? Each holds a small notebook and sharpened pencil in her and his hand. But each also keeps a coin, ready, in a pocket. And each, at least on occasion, makes her or his way to the hall closet, pulls down from its upper shelf the wooden box, takes out from it the cloth-wrapped tome, unwraps and kisses the sacred book, and opens it to read the old script. No, the family practice neither deliberation nor speculation nor faith. The planets themselves sail without oars and without charts. The family too sail with the giddy winds. They close all fourteen lids and lie back to float upon the fathomles
s dream.

  canopy

  The Milky Way, illuminating the darkness above, travels across the dome of the sky in a continuous stream, beautiful.

  the dream

  The new astronomer had his eyes drawn to the cosmos by a passing swift comet in his sixth year. His small feet planted on a hilltop, his thin-cold hand wrapped in his mother’s, he gazed into the marvelous sky. The child’s eyes, still tender, still gaping, took in the mysterious body’s radiant flight across the peaceful firmament. Even as his eyes were drawn to the sky, the strange image—the luminous orb with trailing blue tresses—drew itself upon his brain. And so his gaze was thenceforth fixed skyward, and his mind began working on the task of explicating a firmament that was, after all, not fixed.

  He attended the schools and found the masters who would teach him numbers and geometries. He studied the figures, shaped the models, observed the sky, and returned to his notebooks to adjust his calculations. Over many years of observation, rumination, and refinement, he came to discover the laws of the cosmos, even while the laws of the lands he crisscrossed, in search of a living and a station, could not be sequenced into any system of order. Fickle kings, men of power hungry for more, and for status, war, revolution, disease, fear and superstition, made disorder of all things across the myriad lands. The sky was not fixed and neither was the astronomer’s life. The many years of his life were not steady, not still, because war raged wherever he went. They were not fixed because kings came to power and lost power, honored him and exiled him. They were not steady because his children’s lives were cut short after only a handful of revolutions about the sun.

  What was steady was his devotion to the sky. And he loved the sky with an ardor unmatched in all of the lands. And what he found there through his diligent observations, his computations, and the expert use of his implements told him that the sky moved and shifted according to the laws of harmony and attraction. But when he pulled away long enough to see to the necessities of his earthly life—to beg for the promised income, to uproot his outcast family yet again, to soothe the kings and the generals with false readings of a false sky, to bury his children, then his wife—he saw that the fundamental laws of the sky did not correspond to those that were in place on the surface of the earth. What he read in the stars he could not translate to those about him. The more he turned away from the sky, the more desperately he turned back to it. And through his many turnings, he came to accept this lack of consonance between that above and that below as a tragic and insuperable predicament. He wrote the papers and sent them far and wide to the great thinkers and tinkerers of his time, but few grasped his meaning. So he lived outside his time. Cast out of land and time, the new astronomer dreamed of an automated mechanism, which, though it would not bridge the great divide between the laws of the earth and the laws of the sky, might at least, through a simple and repetitive gesture, express the comedy that is life: the universe has produced, out of dust, a wet convex lens in order to see itself reflected on that surface, but it is wholly unaware of the pining soul the lens in turn has produced in order to reflect upon the universe.

  center

  Look at Mother. She is one and she has produced five. And she keeps her girls about her through a force of attraction unnatural to any but the bright star in the center of a planetary system. Mother is all warmth, all gravity, at once radiating outward and drawing in. She is all love. And the girls have no need to acknowledge or articulate this truth, for their minds cannot fathom their hearts beating, their eyes blinking, their breath rising and falling, their fingers wrapped about a pencil, their legs wrapped around a tree limb, without Mother in the center of their world. But they sense it in their bodies, and their elliptical perambulations about her from the moment of their births, and across the years and the landscapes, are record of it.

  the astronomer’s book

  The sleeping sister, lying on her back, hands folded over her narrow ribcage, flits her eyes to and fro beneath her resting-closed lids. The sleeper dreams. The dreamer reads. The reader recognizes the story in the book as her own story. And she asks the librarian in the dream: who is the author of this book?; this is an old book, yet I recognize the story; it is my own. The librarian takes the book from the girl; she tilts her head; she pushes her glasses farther down the bridge of her nose; she turns the book in her hand, back to front to spine; she sets it down on the counter before her, and opens it to its title page. Oh, this book, she says. Yes, this is the new astronomer’s. One of two works of fiction he wrote. The other is about a dream of the moon. This one, about an automaton.

  five

  The sisters are five. Like the five openings in the face, they let in and let out the world. See this sister, she rises on her toes, raises her arms above her head, spreads her fingers, and arches her back; she is all force, a silent gale. The others run from her, giggling, peeking back. And look there at the sister lying prostrate on the lawn; she adores the scent of living soil, of crushed grass, the beat of an ant brigade across her forearm and into the hollow of her closed hand, the beads of moisture that release at the nape of her neck. Is not all life a letting in and a letting out? And if you rest your fingers lightly on your lips, can you not at once sense your heart and your breath, your mind and the verse it is at this moment delivering to your tongue?

  And the reader dreams.

  moon

  The sister dreams that she rises from bed and walks out into the garden. The others sleep within. Her family, the neighborhood, the city sleeps and she is drawn out into the night. She steps outside and can do naught but look up. Above her, the moon fills the sky so that only in her periphery and along the horizon can she see and sense the muted stars. The white sphere has descended.

  It is a hundred miles above the earth and it fills her vision, fills her mind. She is aware of the space between herself and the moon; it is not a distance she can travel and it is not an empty space. It is suffused with something invisible that emanates from the white orb as the air around a rose in full bloom is suffused with the flower’s scent. The moon has no scent. It radiates no heat. It accommodates no shadow; it is not borrowing light tonight. It has and issues its own soft particulate light, a luminescence rising from its own skin, a light equally bright everywhere and no brighter than it is when the moon is in its cradle in the sky. But now, close, the light is multiplied, not in intensity but in sum and area. And so the sister can look on it with eyes open, studious. Here is the moon, still subtle, still soft, and obliterating all sound, all thought, all drive with these qualities multiplied. Here is the silent satellite freed from its steady course. The girl sees clearly the moon’s face, its pits and peaks, its continuous open fields, its arid shores, the rising crests of its mountains, the sheer walls of its craters. The moon is close; it is white luminescent. Its texture is vivid and its presence keen. It is not unalive. It demands her attention. It is awful and beautiful. She wonders, why has the moon left its path in the sky to come so near? Has it a message? It smiles, it does not smile at her. It speaks/does not speak with her. Why has it woken from its slumberous turning and turning and dreaming and dressing/undressing in the sky to now stand unmoving, demanding, playful? And where are the calendars, the celestial atlases, the paper wheels and dials that predicted this phase of the moon? The sister is alone with the white vivid orb while the others sleep. Somewhere in the distance, perhaps the far distance, others are awake and though she can neither see nor hear them, she senses them, their toils, their practiced gesticulations, their rise and fall utterances. The earth will turn and they will look up. They will see this new moon awakened.

  And the dreamer reads.

  Jewelmouths

  The earth has shared a minute but generous fraction of its existence with humans, who are born of it, slip out from its hot crevices, and almost immediately leave the horizontal position to stand on two feet and gaze skyward. The human offspring inherits but one gesture from its progenitor, a gesture born of a single impulse: the need
to find home. It is the gesture that all others serve. It is the first and the last gesture. In silhouette, it is a small motion, one barely discernible otherwise: the head follows the eyes from the horizon to the stars; the chin draws a short arc over the backdrop of forest and hill. This small motion, limited by bone and sinew, by the human body’s upright structure, mimics the earth’s own tireless rotation: the earth, like a bodiless head, bound to an invisible neck, uses its small range of lateral motion through the seasons to search for home and parent from morning to morning again, from horizon to horizon, across the great emptiness. And so too, the human progeny, who shares a biology with its home, repeats this gesture hourly over the many faces of the earth, in the form of prayer or in the name of science, out of love or resolution. It is the earth that has birthed the child, and it is the earth that, out of love for the unintended offspring, has worn a myriad of expressions, in places tender and devoted, in others weary and exasperated, in places proud and triumphant, in others grimacing. The earth, like a mother half-devoted, gives with one hand to the human child, takes away with the other in its negligence or its half-devotion to that other cause, the one that gnaws at its own core: the need to find its place among the stars. In its dizzying spin, it guesses of a distant origin but is bound in place by gravity’s sinews. And out of pity for the child who has inherited its need, the earth laughs, and a village is born. It breathes, and golden spires rise out of the dust. Towns bud like small blisters over its features. And the human child burning with the same need builds always skyward, builds structures that draw its gaze from horizon to stars. It is the child’s need and destiny to claw out of the womb and to the place of mud, to compel something between its frenzied hands out of dust and water, to lay brick upon brick, to steal height from tree and mountain in order to climb upward in an attempt to but lick the light of dead stars.