The Illustrated Man

From Manhood Lessons of My Youth

It was a magazine book about astronomy

For earnest amateurs — a black sky

Constellation map you could cut out,

Glue to a round cardboard 

And affix an oblate window with a sprocket pin

And turn to any sky at any time of year, 

At any time of night,

Or even in the day you'd see

What wasn't visible because the sun's

Blanketing sheet of day-sky blots out

All rivals but the moon and clouds. 

It was in there how to build a telescope,

How to grind the mirror out of a round 

Pyrex blank, against another round

Green plate-glass beveled blank

Up through the carborundum numbers

Ending at the finest emory dust;

Then on to pouring a pitch lap

And polishing with jeweler's rouge

Till it became a spherical pond of clear glass

That still needed deepening with rouge

To bend into a parabolic form —

And this was called figuring. 

That's all I thought about, because

A grown man was illustrated,

Sleeves rolled up, polishing and figuring

His telescope to be. 

Eventually I did the same as he,

Though only in 8th and 9th grades. 

I didn't realize how much the illustrated man

Was guiding me to manhood and quiet work,

Like my pal Joey's dad two houses away 

Who never spoke, but sometimes

Coming home from work would shoot

A basketball in his driveway

In a grace of repetition at the hoop. 

Men's work, I found, could be

imitated,

But not manhood. Not just yet. 

Manhood was the giant whose role I played. 

My mirror in its frosty curvature

Celebrated graduation as a hazy past;

A new school, a new beginning —

The ladder up to manhood extended,

And then, when I attained first light

The summer after freshman year

My wonder at the moon's bombarded texture,

And the rings of Saturn, or the nebula of Orion hunted down,

Or M 11 and the myriad Milky Way 

Stunned me into childhood for life. 

The illustrated man had grown younger

Until we met — the amateurs of science,

Forever in the transport of those stars. 

John Sevcik