Outside the blizzard days of 1880 have quieted
New England tastes a bit of a thaw
and in the stark winter light of his Cambridge workshop
where a glassine residue drifts in fine rills
and his working telescope casts a devilish shadow
Clark stills his eyes and sees with skin
glides fingertips over his paired refractory lenses
a skater marking perfect figures on perfect ice
years of grinding and polishing such optics
have stripped the lines from his palms and fingers
substituted his spiraled evidence of self
with creases and the red fissures of Mars
often they have picked clean his ego and left him
hiking along the barren shores of physics
always there is this unquenched desire
a raw thirst for precision for absolutes
for the lost terrains of Xanadu or Johannes Kepler
yet he finds truth where he can find it
later he will cup his fists into the Charles
and disturb a cold river of stars
with a touch so sensitive that even simple objects
reveal an order within the curvature to chaos
and all surfaces reveal identities
a smooth continuity of singing fractions
and to pass on to his sons
a rough guide to the musics of the sphere