A Brief History, by GEORGE BRADLEY

Once the world was distant and required imagination,

An anxiety invented out of Abyssinias and Ind, a rumor

Of unusual adornment and a king called Prester John.

Once the horizon hinted, and the sea was a veiled threat.

Heaven was all suspicion then, each mile surmise,

But as all taboo contains its curiosity, in time

The earth surrendered to desire, our importuning,

Sending facts and figures back like Eastern spice,

Yielding its dimensions like so many unknown fruits.

And the world became a succulence, the ripe flesh

Sliding past our palate, the thick juice dripping down,

Fit replacement for the stale confection of ages.

Morsel of unhedged views, tidbit of flowering plain,

The taste was wholesome and to the tooth, until

An absence was remarked, an omitted piquancy, a tang,

The salt of superstition disappearing from this earth.

Soon clouds were not so strange, soon the dying sun

Did not illuminate its waters as onetime was its wont;

Mapmakers settled down to their projections, and mankind

Awoke the prover of hypotheses, a champion of tomorrow.

Predictably, uneasy paradise ensued, a shifty-eyed

Evasion of kismet, a studied complacency wherein

Old diseases were wiped out overnight and death became

A lachrymose faux pas, the most embarrassing complaint.

But then, even as our final victory was proclaimed,

The earth moved, and it all went wrong in the sky.

When the earth’s four corners had been rounded off,

When Chomolungma had been scaled, the oceans plumbed,

When the stars had each been identified and tagged,

And space was subject to high-school science fairs,

Just then, behind the old, a new infinity appeared,

A beaming thing, something energetically waving,

First-class, state-of-the-art, a modern primum mobile.

Fast as the quasar quavers, conclusions fled from us,

While beneath our feet the square inch withdrew,

Retreating before our bold advance with a policy

Of scorched earth and minimal engagement and leaving

A landscape too barren even to be labelled a frontier.

The atoms all but vanished into expressions of a force,

The universe evolved into an impossible description,

And one day it all came clear at last, that moonlight

And the mud, the humblest hearth and siren shores,

Were scenery, of course, but in the theatrical sense,

Effects achieved as always with mirrors and with smoke.

And in that new epiphany our fear came flooding back,

All our instinct for unknowing, our capacity for doubt;

Trepidation was restored, and we welcomed its misgiving,

Embracing an emotion that had trickled from our hearts;

We hoisted high the burden we had once been used to bear

And laughed to feel its weight, wept at its return,

Eager in the exercise of what we knew best how to do

And rejoicing in confusion, in the abject awe

That chafed and was our true talent, and so remained.

From “Of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” (Alfred A. Knopf: $19; 64 pp.). 1991 by George Bradley. Reprinted with permission.