"Maybe the Milky Way" - January O'Neil

“...  Like a private tour

of a planetarium’s dome, it is our night. We know the stars

 are watching us, would cast our shadows into the next galaxy

if they could...”

-   January Gill O’Neil

**

On the universe’s engine

**

I first read “Maybe the Milky Way” when my son was an infant, thrilled and awed by the prospect that one day he would be a little person, able to engage both me and the world. I had tasted enough of motherhood’s wonders to believe it possible, but couldn’t fathom the road ahead.

Time determined the path, though the mystery behind his consciousness remains as wondrous as ever. And yesterday the magic happened.  Instead of lying “in the heart of the White Mountains” we were on the living room floor; instead of tracing “fine clusters of yellow-white to create spirographs in star fields” (*** that phrasing!) we giggled together while tracing the ceiling fan’s rotation (a different kind of “spirograph” ** … photo 2).

“Maybe” a ceiling fan can be “the Milky Way.”

What resonates in particular is O’Neil’s juxtaposition of a circumscribed space (around mother and son), and radiating energy (between son and universe).

The circumscribed space is intimate: son fills “inner space” between mother’s “arm and body;” both are tucked away from the busy world, hidden “far from the glare of city lights.” Mom and son are enclosed within “a planetarium’s dome,” alone as if on “a private tour.” Lost to their immediate circumstances, the “campfire smolders,” marshmallows long forgotten. And within that space, mother and son preside over the universe: they own the night, and together, “girdle” the heavens with their hands.

In counterpoint, son and universe exist in a boundless space. The son is a light that matches the stars; the galaxy gazes on him with a mother’s wonder (“they watch him as I watch him”). His beauty is amplified in the exchange between individual and galaxy (“light on light”). It is “too dangerous to touch or hold or explain.” 

By juxtaposing the intimacy of the moment with its transcendence, O’Neil captures the parent’s extraordinary privilege of holding a whole world in their arms: of lying next to, apart from, and yet fully integrated with an engine of the universe.