by Christy Effinger
God spoke and there was light,
but since I wasn’t there it must have happened
unannounced, the way a tree falling in the forest
unobserved makes no sound, commits no error in its collapse.
Alexander Pope said, “To err is human, to forgive, divine.”
My friends and I scrawled this on our lab reports in physics,
because Mr. Carver always wrote “HUMAN ERROR”
with red ink on our papers. He was not amused.
Nor was God, I suppose, when the Church condemned
Galileo’s heresy of a sun-centered universe.
But Newton believed, daydreaming in formulas
I irreverently botched with my hundred-dollar calculator
and glitter gel pen.
The tilt of the Earth, the pull of the moon,
just the right mix of stardust and sperm—and somehow I slithered
from primordial sludge into public school,
my wet Sketchers squeaking on freshly waxed floors.
All I know of physics are legends and laws:
an object at rest tends to stay at rest
unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
I want to be that force, unbalanced and beautiful,
the tiniest breath of a butterfly’s wing
bringing change to a future written not in stone,
but in sand and sea and clouds.
In a cosmic glance my trials mean nothing;
the grand inquisitors who judged me
for inciting rebellion among believers
during chauvinist sermons and politicized potlucks
banished me from a land I never loved,
from a place I didn’t belong.
After recanting the Earth’s orbit
before a Church court, Galileo reportedly whispered,
“And yet it moves.” I doubt he said this.
Even Galileo feared the flames. I too renounce
my truths again and again, yet still
they stay with me, stuck fast and quick-forgiving.
I’m glad Galileo gave in, imperfect genius that he was.
But alone at night, did he drown his guilt in crimson wine?
Did he rationalize, like I do, that our errors are minor
miscalculations in the eternal human equation?
And did he remind himself that with or without permission,
the revolution goes on?
