Another Eclipse Poem

A PBS documentary tells me

two thousand years ago in Babylon

astronomers notched eighteen years of eclipse 

repetition in cuneiform. They’d discovered 

what Edmond Halley named the saros cycle—

measuring time without place. To calculate path, 

Halley tracked the moon’s 17th-century 

orbit numbers, came within four minutes & twenty miles 

& now: we know within 

seconds where darkness will fall, 

& when—a dance of knowledge & perseverance. 

Saros—according to the Suda, a Byzantine measure, 

a Chaldean number. None of these facts mean anything 

to me in infinitesimal Virginia, but then

I learn plasma lines thrown from the sun’s corona, 

or solar mass ejection, could magnetize us—

our planet’s life—out of existence. Our core 

essentially a magnet—what plasma fields can transform 

into & like us, humans, if spun unpredictably 

far, too fast, undefended, they 

snap. My mind whirls toward what else breaks 

when faced with enough force or misdirection—rope, 

twig, hair strand, any muscle, any bone. I could go on 

as jetlets give birth to solar wind scientists make 

a map of. Lenses in global sync, 

3-D capture of space weather. One day I’d like to see this 

coronagraph, just because. Maybe next eclipse 

I’ll get lucky: light scattering toward me 

from behind the tilted moon. 

Now a plain Monday in April & I watch sky shadows 

change shape through a makeshift pinhole, 

sun at my back, on the patch of earth I rent. I watch how, 

for a few moments, immeasurable heat fakes a surrender.