How to see stars (and other faint things)
To see stars that are very faint you need to avert your gaze. To see them, you don’t look straight at them. You pretend, oh so casually, to look elsewhere. You sneak up on them unawares. You side-eye them.
When you look straight at them, they disappear. Look to the side, however, and they come clear. When we avert our eyes, the light from the star falls on the sensitive part of our eye, the part that can see more clearly in the dark.
Hold on—never mind how it all works, did you hear that? The light from the star falls on our eye… light, millions of years old light, soft white star light falling on our eye….sigh.
“Poetry is like averted vision.” A friend said this to me when I was explaining how the vision thing works. She’s right. This is one of the things I love about poetry.
Poetry is subversive. It doesn’t play by rules we understand. It disrupts and interrupts the way we usually communicate, how we usually read words on the page. Grammar is out. Punctuation is out. Words sitting squarely on a page, out.
“Poetry has you looking one way while it quietly slips in, scrambles your waters and sails off out the other door. You’re busy reading the words, and the light from some star is flooding you. ”
The best things are always glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, don’t you think? A glimpse of something, the beginning of an awareness, an almost-but-not-quite understanding?
The best things always begin with that feeling. Like there is something there, just slightly out of reach. Try as we might, we can’t see it. We try to spin on our heel and catch it off guard, but it spins with us. We know it’s important because, while it won’t yet present itself, neither does it leave us. The clearest we can make it out is when we avert our gaze.
Don’t look straight at it. We don’t have to work everything out. Look to the side, trust things will come clear. One day soon, we’ll be sipping our cup of tea, innocently thinking of the day ahead, while some new awareness quietly slips in, shining its wisdom all over the kitchen floor, adding one more light to the dark.