March 31st, 1990
In Princeton, New Jersey, feet touching
the cold basement of my grandfather’s
home, I dusted off glass cases of old
books and leaflets, science notes illegibly
scratched in. Everything was gray
in the early dawn. I was the first
awake, listening for shuffled steps
to descend the staircase, waiting
for the breakfast clatter of pans,
smelling here the archived newspaper ink.
Published six years before in 1990,
pristine on the wall, I found the one
article I’d heard of from my mother,
about my grandfather and his space telescope.
A color picture of him, black in his hair
accompanied by familiar cloudy strands,
his eyes open and aimed like a camera,
his mouth grinning with the discovery
of something larger beyond the printed page.
Through his window, the purple sky was pricked
with white suns littered in the distance
and worlds blurred in the blackness.
There was a photo of the launch, poised
to leave me behind, now that I had found it.
Outside, crew boats on the lake were calling,
breaking the deathlike silence
and I wanted to call out to my mother
about what I’d found: my grandfather suddenly
new to me and greater than the world.
Asleep beside my grandmother upstairs,
was he dreaming of swirled galaxies
or coffee? Soon I thought I heard his youth
spiral down the stairs to breakfast
and I went up to meet a boy my age,
even if my grandfather looked old. With a grin,
he poured me orange juice and let me ask
if it was true, if we could see through time
the longer and deeper we peered into the blackness.
It was the year before he died and the gray
was lifting off the morning like my flight home,
but his pupils were as clear as a northern night sky.
Fingers curled around a warm cup, he showed me
a man alive back in Princeton, New Jersey.
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So yeah, this poem is an elegy of sorts for my grandfather who passed away on March 31st, 1997. This experience never happened (that I recall), but I think it does him justice. My poetry class seemed to like it well enough. Anyone notice the chiasmus?
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