An Uncoupling

Day Twenty-Eight

With the tiniest throbs and wobbles,

the Moon is slipping from our grasp.

Incandescent with rage but

carefully swept clean.

With a very precise curve,

she might make herself invisible

or a puff of distant gossamer,

perfectly arrayed for the creation of stars.

She has suddenly found out about the wind,

setting hurricanes to spin off like tops.

In some sense, gravity does not exist.

It makes the Moon no less interesting,

or odd, just more explicable.

The work of science is at an end,

like confessing a murder.

How stupid of me not to have thought of it -

the single best idea that anyone ever had;

to merely predict future events exactly.

She won't reach the Oort cloud for another ten thousand years.

Assembled from notes in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.