Nothing Before Seventy Mattered (Katsushika Hokusai)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were
a graduate student
which means
you were the one
who actually
looked
at the chart paper.

A hundred feet
of chart paper
a day
coming out
of a radio telescope
you had helped build
with your own hands
by hammering
posts and stringing wire
across a field
in Cambridge
and your supervisor
did not
hammer posts
because supervisors
do not
hammer posts
and supervisors
do not
read
a hundred feet
of chart paper
a day
and you did both.

[Verse 2]
You found
a quarter inch
of scruff
on the paper
that pulsed
at a rate
too regular
to be noise
and too fast
to be anything
your century
had a name for
and you circled it
in pencil
at three
in the morning
in a cold hut
in a field
and you brought it
to your supervisor
and he called it
*Little Green Men*
as a joke
and you did not
laugh
because you had read
the chart paper
and the chart paper
was not joking.

[Chorus]
It was
a neutron star
spinning
thirty times
a second
sending a pulse
of radio light
across the sky
like a lighthouse
made of something
so dense
a teaspoon of it
weighs
a billion tons
and you had found it
with a pencil
and your eyes
and a quarter inch
of scruff
on a chart
nobody else
had bothered
to read.

[Outro]
The Nobel
went to your supervisor
in nineteen seventy-four.
Your name
was not
on the citation.

The pulsar
is still spinning.
The pulsar
does not know
whose name
is on the citation.
The pulsar
knows
whose pencil
circled it
at three
in the morning
and the pulsar
has been
sending the signal
ever since
and the signal
has always been
for the woman
in the cold hut
who was
the only person
in the building
actually
reading.

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