Emily Kagan Trenchard - In Which I Call Upon Tycho Brahe

In Which I Call Upon Tycho Brahe


Tell them about your pet moose
that got so drunk at your party it fell down the stairs
and broke it’s foreleg.
Tell them about the instruments.

Tell them about the nights you stood with chin
pointing to the heavens and lips quietly mouthing
the positions of the stars. Tell them the stars
are not just stars. The heavens, neither perfect nor immutable.

Tell them about your nose, sliced off in a duel,
and how you covered the windy hole in your face with a brass replica,
lashed it to your head with leather straps,
kept it and the twitching raw skin beneath well greased.

Tell them how you taught a generation to see. Tell them
two good eyes were all you needed to chart the heavens,
and for everything else, there was your psychic midget named Jep.
Tell them the answers are there, in the charts.

Tell them about the commoner you refused to actually marry,
though she gave you 8 children and wore the keys to your castle on her belt.
Tell them at their death stars, too, do not go quiet; they are as furious
and destructive as drunken men of means; they all fall in on themselves.

Tell them how you passed on those charts like Pandora. Like, what now?
Like the boy Kepler could be anything other than what history needed.
Tell them those ellipses were drawn from his gaping mouth.
Tell them you were for Kepler, as Kepler was for Galileo, and how

he cracked open the head of a God by smashing it against the sky.
Tell them how you loved a good party.
Tell them how the wild and ethereal world
is always in attendance.


Hello everyone! I figured as I've been doing some fairly heavy poetry recently, I'd do something a little more lighthearted today, and what's more lighthearted than picking on Tycho Brahe and everything that was wrong in his life. Brahe was kind of a mean person, especially his habit of getting in fights with anyone who disagreed with him, and his lack of ability to socialize beyond stargazing. As the poem says, he did have a lover who bore him eight children, though he would not marry her because she was a commoner. I just wanted to post something to brighten everyone's day, so have fun reading and go out and enjoy the brief moments it's not raining here in Rochester.

Signing off ~Sam Zimmerman