Ode to Olbers' Paradox

Lyrics

Bremen.
The roof is slick with frost.
Coal smoke on the wind, and the dark smell of the Weser river.
It is very late.
Heinrich Olbers adjusts the brass.
His eye to the lens, 1823.
The question isn't new. Kepler asked it in 1610.
Halley worried at it.
If the woods are endless, and the trees are white…
Then whichever way you look, you see a trunk.
The forest should be white.
The sky should be a solid sheet of fire.
Every line of sight should end upon a star.
But you are dark.
Oh, you are so beautifully, perfectly dark.
Not an absence. Not a failure of the light.
You are the answer.
The question is the key, but you, you are the door.
Why is the night sky dark?
He’s not looking for this.
He’s hunting comets.
Found Pallas this way, back in 1802.
A smudge of light against the velvet.
But tonight the velvet is the thing.
The deep, quiet, impossible black between the points of fire.
It goes on forever.
The void that shouldn't be there.
The cold that holds the stars apart.
And you are dark.
Oh, you are so terribly, perfectly dark.
Not an absence. Not a failure of the light.
You are the answer.
The question is the key, but you, you are the door.
Why is the night sky dark?
Because the forest had a beginning.
Because the light is still traveling.
Some of it will never get here.
The trees are running away from us.
Stretching their light into red, then into nothing.
This darkness… it is the memory of birth.
It is the sound of the universe expanding.
On a rooftop in Bremen.
Frost on the brass.
The physician pulls his collar tight against the cold.
He looks up from the lens.
And sees you.
The evidence.
The history.
The dark.