The Stargazing Platform

Lyrics

I left the ghost of a cigar in the Smoking Room's cold hearth. Up the grand staircase, ignoring the turn toward the bedrooms, toward the heart of the house. The ancestors in the Portrait Hall watched me climb. Their painted eyes know this route by heart. Up the narrow back stairs then, past the brittle stacks of the Newspaper Archive, past the unfinished thoughts locked away in the Manuscript Room. Always up. Toward the last, heaviest door.

And the air hits. October, two in the morning. Smells like the city burning its coal and the lawn getting its final cut before the frost. The two deck chairs are skeletons of rust, still holding the shape of conversations held in 1924. A stage set for a play that closed decades ago. No audience left, not even a ghost. 

And there you are. The old brass sextant, bolted to the southeast corner. Your index arm frozen solid at thirty-seven degrees, twelve minutes. You were meant to measure parallax, to bring a star down to our level, to perform mastery. A tool for plotting a course. Now you just point. A fixed declaration. The perfect angle of a memory we can no longer triangulate.

The loose shingle taps out the cadence of forgetting. Every eleven seconds, the sound draws a thin silver line against the dark. The exact color of grandfather's flask under the moon. He’d stand here, pointing up at Cassiopeia, or what he called Cassiopeia. It was never about the stars. It was about the confident wrist, the low voice, the shared fiction of knowing our precise place in the universe.

And there you are. My old brass sextant, bolted to the rail. Your arm frozen solid at thirty-seven degrees, twelve minutes. You weren't measuring a celestial body. You were measuring the distance from the man with the cigar to the boy with the cold hands. A fixed declaration. The perfect angle of a memory we can no longer triangulate.

The show is over. The cast is gone. Just the instrument, left to measure the weight of the sky. Just the instrument. And the view from the edge.