8. Nicole Sealey

“Though the last line of the poem suggests otherwise, the stars in the sky are most likely not dead.” -Nicole Sealey

It’s a nice thought: because the stars in the sky are so far away, by the time their light makes it to our eyes, the course of their life has already expired. An idea filled with great lyrical resonance, rich with melancholy and symbolic possibility, it is also, as Nicole Sealey tells us in an explanatory note to her poem “Medical History,” and as scientists confirm, simply not true. Or at least not in most cases. Light travels at the extremely fast rate of about 300,000 kilometers per second, and so the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, is only about 8.6 light years away. Even a much more distant visible star like Deneb is just 3,000 light years from us, and while three millennia is a long time in the history of humankind, it’s a small fraction in the life of a star. Deneb is almost certainly still going strong.

And yet, writers can’t help but continue to perpetuate this appealing falsehood. In Sealey’s case, the idea pops up in the last line of “Medical History.” A short poem that begins as a somewhat straightforward recital of the narrator’s medical past (“I’ve been pregnant. I’ve had sex with a man/who’s had sex with men”), the piece branches out to both take in the health history of her relatives and hint at larger anxieties on the narrator’s part. After an unexpected turn towards the philosophical, the poem ends by reaching out far beyond the lives of the mortals with which it’s dealt so far, landing on that final image of scientific falsehood/poetic truth: “And, I understand,/the stars in the sky are already dead.”

Like Sealy, I’m no stranger to this viewing-of-the-dead-stars image, although my efforts at using it for literary effect were likely a bit clumsier than hers. As a teenager, I wrote a short play, an apprentice effort, that was heavily indebted to all the Theater of the Absurd authors I was reading at the time. Riffing on Ionesco, Beckett, and Pinter, my one-acter consisted of a dialogue between two young men camping out beneath the stars. While one of the men cowers under the existential dread induced by the open sky, the other, increasingly aggressive, forces him to confront his terror, ultimately tearing down the tent. The play’s dialogue was a hodgepodge of faux-profound declarations and cribbed lines from my TOA heroes, culminating in a scene where the terrified man, overwhelmed by the distance of the stars, reflects somberly on mortality, that of the stars and that of himself.

In retrospect, the man’s declarations represent something of a double falsehood: whatever scientific inaccuracies they may have contained and the falsehoods that resulted from my scattershot pastiche, as I marshalled whatever words I could find to help me represent rather than fully work through the concept of existential terror. But while I accept the deficiencies of my teenage efforts, I still think it’s necessary for writers, whether young scribes or fully formed poets, to be able to freely play with scientific fact, especially given the provisional nature of what science holds to be true at any given moment. If a disclaimer needs to be made, then, let it be made, but let it not distract from the thing being disclaimed. Or let it be, as it is in Sealey’s hands, a new opportunity. In the second half of her explanatory note to “Medical History,” after telling us that the stars in the sky are probably not really dead, she offers up one additional piece of information. Rather than shut things down in the name of scientific obligation, she uses this new factoid to open up fresh symbolic possibilities, leading to a final affirmation. “The distance between the stars and us is so great,” Sealey writes, “that we can only see the brightest stars, which is to say the most alive.”