Telescope

            by Louise Gluck

  
   There is a moment after you move your eye away
   when you forget where you are
   because you've been living, it seems,
   somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

   You've been stopped being here in the world
   You're in a different place
   a place where human life has no meaning.

   You're not a creature in a body.
   You exist as the stars exist,
   participating in their stillness, their immensity.
   
   Then you're in the world again.
   An night, on a cold hill,
   taking the telescope apart.

   You realize afterward
   not that the image is false
   but the relation is false.

   You see again how far away
   each thing is from every other thing.



   Page 52, New Yorker, January 17, 2005