I
As a young man,
Glamorous and reckless,
And uncertain of any purpose,
He had fallen in love with a poet
— a poet
who, from childhood onward,
had always known that he would write.

Together,
They had lived in Prague,
Studying alchemy,
Reading Franz Kafka,
Climbing the hill to the Castle,
And visiting the dead
In the Jewish Cemetery.

They had stood
In the main square,
Turning to each other in horror
As they realized
How close by the ghetto was,
Thinking of the massacres there,
While the Czechs
Went about their ordinary business.

Later, they had prayed
In the Pinkas Synagogue,
Reading silently
The inscribed names of each of the 77,000 murdered Jews.

II
For several years,
The poet wrote easily each day,
While his lover
Wandered,
Increasingly uncertain, through the city.

Drawn by an invisible thread of memory,
He found himself returning more and more frequently,
Especially at night,
To the square and its clock tower
— although never once glancing upward at the stars—
Thinking of moments in its history.

III
One New Year’s Eve,
He and the poet
Waited in the square
Until finally,
An hour before dawn,
All the revelers had departed,
Leaving the two men alone in the vast square.

Dawn broke,
And the clock
Struck six—
a skeletal figure appearing,
ringing the bells,
and then
turning an hourglass upside down—
When he
(always the more romantic of the two)
Announced to the poet
His decision to become an astronomer.

IV
They then left Prague
To travel to Dresden,
Where the Young Astronomer sought out
The great celestial sphere
By Muhammad ben Mu aijad al-Ardi,
And after this,
Guided by the dreams of this famous thirteenth-century Arabic astronomer,
Began his years of study.

V
He was still young
When,
During his first year,
In the Old Observatory,
He discovered a new constellation.

Remembering the Pinkas synagogue in Prague,
He named it
In memory of the Jewish dead,
And,
Though not Jewish,
Began each of his mornings
By reciting the Kaddish for them.

VI
He was to remember his early life—
of the poet, Prague, its Jewish history,
of the clock tower and the celestial globe,
and of his naming of the constellation—
As he sat solitary,
In the Old Observatory,
Watching the Falling Star.