The Music of the Spheres

Lyrics

I press my ear to the night sky.
I know you’re not there.
But I listen for you anyway.
The way you listen for a heartbeat in a house that’s gone quiet.

You were born from a single string stretched over wood.
A bronze wire in a stone room in Croton.
A perfect fifth. A clean octave.
Pythagoras heard the god in the ratio.
And he looked up, and gave that ratio to the moon.
He tuned the planets to the mathematics of beauty.
You were the proof that the universe was not an accident.
You were its mind, made audible only to the soul.

Oh, the musica universalis.
The silent chord that held the seven wanderers in place.
You were the reason everything did not fall apart.
The hum too perfect for the human ear to bear.
A harmony we were born inside, and never heard at all.

Were you lonely? Did you know we couldn't hear you?
The slow bass drone of Saturn on the cosmic rim.
The quick, impossible grace note of Mercury.
Did you feel us, living out our noisy, dissonant lives on a planet tuned to a perfect mode?
You were the sanity holding back the caligo of the void.
You were a cathedral built of gravity and light.
A beautiful idea. The most beautiful wrong idea.

Then came the cold room in Linz, 1619.
A man with tired eyes and numbers that would not lie.
He found the wobble. The ellipse.
The beautiful circle, broken.
And in the quiet of his calculations, the great chord began to evanesce.
Not with a crash, but a slow, mathematical sigh.

Oh, the musica universalis.
The silent chord that held the seven wanderers in place.
You were the reason we thought nothing would fall apart.
The hum too perfect for the human ear to bear.
A harmony we were born inside, and never heard at all.

Your orbit is a poem now.
A metaphor for mystics.
But I will remember you as you were.
I will sing the octave between the Earth and the fixed stars.
I will hum the perfect fifth from Jupiter to Mars.
I will sing you.