Liber Caeli - Chapter 48

Verses

Ladies, gentlemen, spirits, creditors: behold the Magician of the Seventh Distance!

I rotate the stage ninety-eight degrees and call your vertigo revelation.

Observe the rings: not Saturn's grand jewelry, but thin knives hidden under blue sleeves.

Observe the moons named like actors who wandered out of Shakespeare and missed Earth entirely.

For my next trick I shall make north become sideways without moving your chair.

For the trick after that, I shall make an eighty-four-year orbit disappear inside one sentence.

Do not ask how. Magicians and cosmologists both charge more after that question.

I keep electricity in one pocket and social unrest in the other. Astrology has terrible inventory control.

A volunteer from the audience shouts that correlation is not causation. Excellent! Give the skeptic a better seat.

I prefer doubters. Believers ruin timing by applauding before the trick.

Now watch closely: I place the old universe under this cloth.

I remove the cloth. The universe is larger.

You accuse me of deception, yet the extra planet was there before the curtain.

The final trick is always the same: making ignorance visible.