Who is waiting on a bed in a room in the afternoon for God.
His Majesty is on his way, who long ago has died.
She is a victim in the kingdom, and is proud.
Have pity on me a thousand years from now when we meet.
Open the mummy case of this text respectfully.
You find no one inside.
THE COSMOS TRILOGY (2003)
The Cosmos Poems (2000)
1. INTO THE EMPTINESS
Into the emptiness that weighs
More than the universe
Another universe begins
Smaller than the last.
Begins to smaller
Than the last.
Dimensions
Do not yet exist.
My friend, the darkness
Into which the seed
Of all eleven dimensions
Is planted is small.
Travel with me back
Before it grows to more.
The church bell bongs,
Which means it must be noon.
Some are playing hopscotch
Or skipping rope during recess,
And some are swinging on swings,
And seesaws are seesawing.
That she is shy,
Which means it must be May,
Turns into virgin snow
And walking mittened home with laughing friends.
And the small birds singing,
And the sudden silence,
And the curtains billow,
And the spring thunder will follow—
And the rush of freshness,
And the epileptic fit that foams.
The universe does not exist
Before it does.
2. MIRROR FULL OF STARS
A can of shaving cream inflates
A ping-pong ball of lather,
Thick, hot, smaller than an atom, soon
The size of the world.
This does take time to happen.
Back at the start
Again, a pinprick swells so violently
It shoots out
Hallways to other worlds,
But keeps expanding
Till it is all
There is. The universe is all there is.
Don’t play with matches.
The candle flame follows her
With its eyes. The night sky is a mirror
On a wall.
What she stands in front of are the roaring afterburners
Of the distant stars a foot away
Leaving for another world. They have been summoned
To leave her
For another girl
In another world who stands there looking
In a mirror full of stars
At herself in her room.
The room is not really,
But it might be. If there is
Something else as beautiful
As this snow softly falling outside, say.
The universe begins
With a hot ball of lather expanding
In a hand
That should be in her bed asleep.
3. WHO THE UNIVERSE IS
The opposite of everything
That will be once
The universe begins
Is who it is.
Laws do not apply
To the pre-universe.
None of it
Does not make sense.
Puffs to the size
Of an orange in one single stunned
Instant
From smaller than a proton.
Morning coffee black
Happiness so condensed
Had to expand to this,
Had to expand to this,
Had to expand to this
Universe of love
Of freezing old
Invisible dark matter
To give it gravity.
If the hot unbelievable
Nothingness feeds
Itself into a hole and starts,
None of this does not make sense
Once you understand
The stars are who it is,
The sisters and the brothers.
Set the toaster setting between Light and Dark
And the unimaginable
Pre-universe will pop up a slice of strings
In eleven dimensions which balloons.
4. UNIVERSES
Think of the suckers on the tentacles
Without the tentacles. A honeycomb
Of space writhing in the dark.
Time deforming it, time itself deformed.
Fifteen billion light-years later a president
Of the United States gives the Gettysburg Address.
Two minutes. The solar system
Star beams down on him.
Other special stars express themselves,
Not shy at all, particles
Of powder floating on the swirl, each
Vast—each a vast pillow covering
A hidden speck it murderously
Attempts to suffocate.
The speck will eat it up.
The speck of gravity is a hole.
Through that hole there is a way.
There are as many of these, there are as many of these
Invisible black caviar
Specks as it would take
To fill the inside of St. Peter’s to the roof.
It is the number
Of grains of sand on the shores
Surrounding the continent of Africa times ten.
Each invisible eyelet is a black hole
Highway out of time.
Think of the universe as a beanbag
On a bobsled on a run under lights at night.
Inside are universes.
It is incompletely dark inside.
There is motion.
There is the possibility.
5. BLACK STOVEPIPE HAT
The wobbly flesh of an oyster
Out of its shell on the battlefield is the feel
Of spacetime
In the young universe.
The petals of the rose
Of time invaded
The attitude of zero and made it
Soften its attitude.
Lincoln’s black stovepipe hat
Was dusty when he sat down
To scant applause. Many in the crowd did not know
He had just delivered
The Gettysburg Address, but it is over,
And the stars keep on redshifting,
The universe keeps on expanding
The petals of the rose.
U. S. Grant’s cigar’s red tip
Pulsed the primal fireball out
Through the new universe
It was the creator of with shock waves.
Speckles of the stars
And baby’s breath (the flower)
Activate infinity
And decorate the parlor.
Baby’s breath is counting on the roses
With it in the vases.
It is difficult to understand
Why the universe began.
It is difficult to be
Robert E. Lee.
Why does the cosmos have to happen?
What is another way?
6. THE CHILDHOOD SUNLIGHT
Blessed is the childhood sunlight
The solar star emotes.
Darkly filled-up emptiness
And galaxies too far away
Are what we feel inside ourselves
That make us want to walk somewhere,
And then we run and jump and sing.
The universe is not enough,
We rock ’n’ roll to other ones
Through black hole wormhole timeways,
But here right now the rain has stopped,
The air is warm.
The parking lot washed clean smells sweet,
And even has a rainbow that
A little girl tiptoes toward,
&nbs
p; Hoping not to frighten it.
The neighbor’s dog that won’t go home
Is watching her—which she can’t see—
With naked eyes of love and awe.
She feels that way herself sometimes.
When you are sure that you’re alone,
Tell yourself to not be sure.
This universe is not the first.
The other ones are not the same.
Or anyway no one can know.
At night when she should be asleep
She lights a match and blows it out
To show she has the power to.
Computers crunch the numbers and
The other stars lie down and say
The sun exhausts itself with light.
So good night.
7. BEYOND THE EVENT HORIZON
And isn’t it
The presence of a thing
That can’t be seen
More massive than the universe?
And isn’t it the strings
Of its own gut beneath infinity the bow
Who vibrate musically to make
The Primal Scene?
You realize this means
The massless spin-2 particle whose
Couplings at long distances
Are those of general relativity.
It means
Strings of an instrument that are
Ten to the minus thirty-two centimeters
In diameter in the Theory of Everything.
It means the temple
Is of a size
Too small for belief—indeed, whose
Dimensions do not begin.
O instrument.
O scene that moves the bow.
We could be everything that
Could be otherwise,
Reversed inside the tiny walled whirlpool
Of a black hole, but can’t.
Even infinity is stuck and can’t stop.
We could be
Playing with the toys
In another space,
Generating the video
Of something else.
8. BLUE AND PINK
The very young universe has reached
The size of a BB.
The idiopathic
Rheostat dialed up the expansion.
Suddenly it sticks out
A hair of spacetime.
It is of course the size of the universe
Inside the tiny BB.
All this happened long ago,
But still is happening
In my mind as I look for the runway
In the fumes.
Oxygen
Is not in the atmosphere
Of this particular planet.
The mother-of-pearl means that
If we decide to land,
We will slide. The ammonia park
Is the innocent summer’s day
Colors of a Della Robbia terra-cotta statue.
The oil derrick–like devices pumping
Are the creatures.
We do a flyby
And decide better not.
Baby blanket blue and baby blanket pink we were warned
To watch out for when we were launched.
The good ship Gigabyte
Sails the seas of space.
Girls and boys, every planet we visit is different.
Some are made of ice cream and some are the blue and pink
Of the sign in front of the movie star’s house:
ARMED RESPONSE.
9. GALAXIES
Everyone knows that the moon
Is made of rice,
But how many of you know
That the jellyfish
You see in the picture on page 8—
Everybody open your book—
Is eleven million light-years wide?
It is beautiful, to boot.
It is beautiful to kick
The ball into the goal.
It is beautiful to know how
To answer the phone.
The jelly that looks like frog spawn
You see in the back pond
Is so many stars.
No, stars are different from Mars.
Everybody come to the window.
The blackness of space
Is simply the everything we are,
Subtracting the light.
The everything we are,
Minus the light,
Is what the battery acid is
Without the bulb.
But the bulb without the lens
To focus the heart
Is the spaceship we are all in
Without the artificially created gravity we need.
We all need
Our mothers and fathers who are dead.
We all need to be good
In case we will die too.
10. FEMINISTS IN SPACE
The stars are happy flowers in a meadow.
The grass is green and sweetly modest.
The burble of the brook
Is the thrust powered back.
Best friend, you walk with me through life,
Let’s take a walk in space.
I’m suiting up, not easy, lots of laughter,
Squirming out of the girl suit, floating into the other.
We will be feminists in space,
Flying toward the stars,
With our backpack portable life-support,
All a grownup needs,
Even if there is a tether back to the mother
Ship we came from.
Leave your dolls behind.
Opening the hatch.
Two gentlemen are out taking a stroll
In their space suits big as polar bears.
That blue-eyed snowball is the planet Earth.
Oh, there’s America, my earth, my ground.
Cars and factories and rain forests burning have farted
The cloud cover that suffocates the ball,
Which up here we jet away from
With our jet nozzles, squirting around like squids.
We can do anything we want.
We can turn somersaults all day long.
I also want to star in a movie but I want to sing
By being a scientist and being my brain.
Women of the world unite
Already at ten years old.
Two friends are skipping home from school,
Each with her own thoughts.
11. THIS NEW PLANETARIUM
The universe roars an expletive
Starburst in every direction
Like the U.S. Navy Blue Angels
Flying their routine.
Everyone talks about the silence of light
But no one talks about the sound
Beyond decibels that
Is equally uncontainable,
And which the heavens declare the glory
Of as the jets explode
In joys expanding at a rate
That is increasing.
It is the candles
On a birthday cake blowing out
But lighting up—it is after the fast
A feast of spacetime
Faster and faster, uncontainable,
As the whole thing breathes out,
The rib cage of the universe expanding
Quite a bit faster than at the beginning.
Everyone talks about the silence
But no one talks about the sound.
I hear the light.
I hear the mighty organ bellowing heaven through
The bars of my playpen and I
Stand up, wobbling, age one,
Holding on to the sunshine
That is falling outside my window.
The light roars through this new planetarium.
Most of the universe is
The dark matter we are not made of,
But we stand.
12. INVISIBLE DARK MATTER
It is the invisible
Dark matter w
e are not made of
That I am afraid of.
Most of the universe consists of this.
I put a single normal ice cube
In my drink.
It weighs one hundred million tons.
It is a sample from the densest star.
I read my way across
The awe I wrote
That you are reading now.
I can’t believe that you are there
Except you are. I wonder what
Cosmologists don’t know
That could be everything
There is.
The someone looking at the page
Could be the everything there is,
Material that shines,
Or shined.
Dark matter is another
Matter. Cosmologists don’t know.
The physicists do not.
The stars are not.
Another thing beside
The row of things is
Standing there. It is invisible,
And reads without a sound.
It doesn’t matter
That it doesn’t really.
I need to take its hand
To cross the street.
13. A TWITTERING BALL
A twittering ball of birds
Repeatedly bursts in the sky,
Losing its shape but regaining it,
Making a fist and unfolding finger by finger
Time and galaxies and dust
Out of the little beginning herpes
Pimple swelling
Energy out, heat, huge,
Spacetime hiccuping
Itself outward into
Itself in exponential surges
According to the mathematics.
The mathematics prepares
The student stars.
It predicts a certain
Unevenness in the performance.
How to connect the very small
To the very large is the task
Ahead. The task ahead
Is the path of the mathematics not yet
Walked down to the place
Where we meet in a mirror,
Sit down together, raise a glass of wine
And smile, nodding in accord.
General relativity
And quantum theory at the same table at last
Lift a fork
The size of the universe to eat a pea.
The Planck length is the pea.
Hawking guiding his self-powered wheelchair
And Einstein riding his bicycle
Walk the Planck.
14. THE STAR
I was thinking about dogs
To fight death.
They get hold of it by the teeth and can
Go on forever.
Poems 1959-2009 Page 10