Today’s episode is guest hosted by Maggie Smith.

Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

If you ask my kids, they’ll tell you my powers are limited. I can help with essays for English class, and with brainstorming ledes for the school paper, and probably with history homework, but calculus and chemistry? Not so much. My children knew that once they reached fourth grade math, I was no longer going to be a helpful resource. “Google it” is often my response, along with “Email your teacher” and “Go to office hours.”

I have an imagination, and an ear for language, but subjects that are more black-and-white feel just out of my grasp. Bringing these subjects into poems, though—now that’s something I’m interested in. Poems, after all, have their own logic. Poems reveal the mind behind them.

Today’s poem does something I admire a great deal, which is to bring two unexpected things together: a scientific discovery of a new planet, and the issue of marriage rights. Here, the poet builds a bridge between them using that spectacular, versatile tool I mentioned before: the imagination.

Astronomers Locate a New Planet
by Matthew Olzmann

“Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, 
so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.”
—Reuters, 8/24/2011

Like the universe’s largest engagement ring, it twirls
and sparkles its way through infinity.
The citizens of the new world know about luxury.
They can live for a thousand years.
Their hearts are little clocks 
with silver pendulums pulsing inside,
Eyes like onyx, teeth like pearl.
But it’s not always easy. They know hunger. 
They starve. A field made of diamond
is impossible to plow; shovels crumble and fold 
like paper animals. So frequent is famine,
that when two people get married, 
one gives the other a locket filled with dirt.
That’s the rare thing, the treasured thing, there.
It takes decades to save for,
but the ground beneath them glows,
and people find a way.

On Earth, when my wife is sleeping,
I like to look out at the sky.
I like to watch TV shows about supernovas, 
and contemplate things that are endless
like the heavens and, maybe, love.
I can drink coffee and eat apples whenever I want.
Things grow everywhere, and so much is possible,
but on the news tonight: a debate about who
can love each other forever and who cannot.

There was a time when it would’ve been illegal
for my wife to be my wife. Her skin,
my household of privilege. Sometimes, 
I wish I could move to another planet.
Sometimes, I wonder what worlds are out there.
I turn off the TV because the news rarely makes
the right decision on its own. But even as the room 
goes blacker than the gaps between galaxies,
I can hear the echoes: who is allowed to hold 
the ones they wish to hold, who can reach 
into the night, who can press his or her
own ear against another’s chest and listen
to a heartbeat telling stories in the dark.

“Astronomers Locate a New Planet” by Matthew Olzmann from CONTRADICTIONS IN THE DESIGN © 2016 Matthew Olzmann. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.