2004 Annual Report of the Royal Society of New
Zealand
Incorporating the 2004 Academy Yearbook
Contents
Academy Council Yearbook
Transit
for Michael King
An eye in the curve of a bay,
a pupil in the circle of a lens,
an eyelash sweeping the glass
clean of the smallest grit
on the surface of the mind,
so that, way out there,
Venus becomes a barque
moving across its measurable
sea of light, shadowing forth
the noble angle of the parallax.
Passage of island to island,
a leather-clad observatory
hoisted into a tree in a remote cove.
The quest to fix exact longitude
hangs on a held-in breath,
an eye on a marine clock,
as the planet’s speck touches the limb
and the count-down begins.
Our place is fixed among the stars,
but not among the continents
which drift on currents of their own,
tectonic plates carrying us to other,
more imagined destinations.
And something is always occluding
our certainties, pulling the perfect
sphere of our knowledge out of shape,
like Venus on the Sun’s edge,
turning us back to our equations,
with the tides lapping the sand
or caulked boards beneath our feet.
So we come to this apt conclusion:
that here is as good as anywhere
to value the constancy of the planets
in transit, the calculations
made in companionable silence,
that turn out slightly wrong,
dangers coolly perceived and faced,
shoals and reefs that remind us
not to get too comfortable with life,
to relish the dangerous edge
of the Universe—the trajectory rising
to a sudden flare-up in the heavens
that’s not a comet or a meteor
but a bright cargo of human hopes
greeting the empyrean.
© Chris Orsman 2004
