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Brett Kell De Mundi Aetherei, or the Resurrection of Tycho Brahe Tyge, Lord of Uraniburg, when will you touch so lightly your finger to the metal bridge of your nose, bless us with an old man’s story? Hold above us that which holds you, is your waxy glove, predicated on peering carefully into the wide black yonder. Concerning the New Phenomena in the Ethereal World, you called it, spinning everything we knew backwards off the tongue like a pumpkin seed. Was the universe born in your shadowy basement at Hven in 1574? Our Milky Way, vast and incomplete, is a one-off; the only anomaly this side of heaven. We search its parts like a child might skip rocks—in earnest and unthinking. What might it have done us good to think of? The cold streets of Skane are but a memory, your heliocentric theory flatly rejected— Are we left to infer your unshaven self in moonlight? Wake this very morning to feather the night sky from your eyes, darkness of duty replacing darkness of slumber – you have been given this island, your daily bread, and a tower of stars so tall it could fall past Copenhagen and the King, out past the sea and the edge of the earth and into galaxies everlasting. This is what you lived for, all the star-strung melodies laid out in interstellar tablature, gifts of hum and silence, a portal to the unexplored left shuttered up like a cavernous barn in the wild. Those things we cannot know were yours, so many perfect sacraments—every nova a son, a daughter - spun from a loom of gypsy stars unafraid of dangling somewhere in the galactic chasm between your eyelid and the mineral fields spinning from their planetary waistlines like a hula hoop. They curl in your nostrils and bury secrets at the base of your skull, the powdered hands replacing the glass cataract, the telescope hulking over you in the shape of a giant oak, careful to hold up the fruit of so many years – You taught a man how to discern the orbit of bodies around one another, but where, Tyge, is the center of the universe? From where do we start to trace our spin, like a protractor marking an elliptical path through these cosmos? A young man will pledge one day to walk up to the heavens in your boot steps, his nose less perfect than even yours, and carry on the dear work of tearing apart the sky. <- Back to Issue 2/1 |
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All ideas and expressions contained herein represent the opinions of the authors whose names appear on each contribution, not Antioch University Seattle or the staff of KNOCK. Copyright ©2004-2006 by KNOCK, Antioch University Seattle. Trademark law protects Antioch names and logos. |