Their eyes are pure
Fame and purity.
This was just an idea.
It came from thinking about the star.
I don’t know its name.
It is very far away.
What does it say?
I was walking down by the water.
The night was warm,
The smell of spring.
In outer space the cold
Is fertile and freezes anything clean.
The star has the face
Of a flower.
It is burning and freezing
Immensity.
It has the power
To say a name.
When you look out the specially reinforced viewhole
Of the spaceship at the universe,
You are glancing down at the top
Of a tee as you prop a golf ball there
For the drive.
You look off in the distance toward the flag.
The black velvet lining of the box
That holds the stars is soft.
I let the dogs off the leash
And let them run and I pray.
15. SPECIAL RELATIVITY
I am pushing the hidden
Pedals of my little car
To get somewhere I have
To get to.
The stars are everywhere, like tourists
At cherry blossom time.
A mist of cosmic dust
Drifts by for years.
Little Red Car to Earth:
I am up here. It’s fun.
I’m doing all the things.
I’m signing off now to pedal.
The little boy pedaled
Through space in his car.
The birch canoe paddled
To avoid the black hole.
The stars stared,
Not being cool,
And stalked the celebrity cherry
Blossoms for an autograph.
And the very latest,
And the weather forecast,
And the Weather Channel,
And motorcycles are dangerous.
I was furiously pumping
The pedals of my little car
To get somewhere I had
To get to.
By the laws of special relativity,
I began to wrinkle and bend.
The universe has no end,
But I am getting there.
16. TAKE ME TO INFINITY
We are completely
In the dark with our eyes.
We listen with the radio
Telescope to the noise.
We repair the Hubble
Telescope in place in space because they hiss
It is head and shoulders above a 200-inch dish
On a mountaintop—but really
Astronomy is just like
Playing in the bath with a rubber duck
And looking at the universe all
At once and
We know so much nothing,
Why not know some more?
I say to the people
Of the United States,
Enough time has passed.
I say to the people of the world,
The time has come
And gone and now.
How did the universe begin?
I will count to ten.
How will it end?
I had the most amazing dream.
You were on all fours like a dog
And I was walking you
Around—
And you were me!
And I was reading me the riot act
Because I don’t make sense.
Both of me say: Take me to infinity!
Take me to before the universe!
17. POEM
Her hobby is laughter.
She plays the musical saw.
Her bunk is aft.
It’s her turn to sleep.
Mission Control is working feverishly
Through the night
To solve the problem and needs her
Awake.
The international space crew
Floats in the dark
Composing final thoughts
And smelling the smoke.
She is the most popular
Mission Commander
In the history of the Shakespeare program ever—
Brave, Chinese, and brilliantly alive.
She is a wife and mother
And Girl Scout leader.
Suddenly the ship shakes violently.
Something has exploded.
Shakespeare 5 has been sent up
With all the world’s hopes. One
Last chance to deflect the asteroid.
This is Mission Control. We’re not reading you, Shakespeare. Over.
She wakes up in her crib
And is covered with moonlight.
She hears the nearby murmur
Of voices
Which must be the TV
One billion human beings
Are watching.
Someone softly covers her with her blanket.
18. SUPERSYMMETRY
You step into the elevator
To go down and it goes up,
And the surprise
Of the sensation of sudden
Happiness is weightless.
So is love.
The chemistry of intergalactic
Space is scarcely human,
But on the other hand we
Are all related.
So is love.
Einstein bicycled right here, didn’t he?
The guru Edward Witten, talking
Along the same Princeton streets many years after
And into the grounds of the Institute
For Advanced Study, is not lost.
He zooms to a blackboard
Of equations about
The quantum mechanics
Of the central thing when it is raining outside.
He titters behind
The flutter of a geisha fan,
In heavy makeup, left, right, male, female,
Kabuki, kooky.
Over the ocean in France, the platinum meter stick
Under a glass bell is rational,
And meaningless,
And dissolving.
But Witten grasps it cheerily in one hand
And the geisha fan in the other,
Like the pots of gold at the ends of the rainbow
In the rain.
19. EVERYTHING
And they overwhelm you and force
You to stay still till it is over.
Movies do.
I like the speed of light.
I like the speed
And the incomparably blurred
Sensation of being deformed
Into being and about to begin.
The starter is the inexhaustible
Appetite of the non-living
Miracle to grow a universe, so to speak,
So many digits
Every blink,
Tick tick tick tick
From the beginning.
I unlock the steamer trunk
From the days when they used to
Travel with steamer trunks. I lift the lid and inside
Find the original blast of spacetime
Growing outward toward a distant shore.
The stars are singing to the stars
In there, stars to stars.
It isn’t over
When the galaxies cluster
And the audience is crying
And you are.
It overwhelms you and forces
You to stay till it is over.
The same poem over and over
You are witnessing, the swelling of the universe
Into the rose
Which it will give.
20. HAPPINESS
It isn’t every day, but most,
That one inflicts this on oneself.
It is intole
rable.
Such universality
Means there is no other place
So one must do it here, do
And be, and feel the joy
Most days bring.
We have scars
On our imagination that come from
Joy. I mean, the woman has
A huge star sapphire buried
In the middle of her forehead, yes?
And that is good.
And the universe she sits
On is.
Her third eye is.
However, it bleeds.
The universe is in a skillet
Cooking into something yum.
I say
Cimabue painted her without the sapphire
Holding the infant Jesus.
The dervish dancers swirl
In their white robes which whirl the stars
Into galaxies and the galaxies
Into cheese. The blue shoe is the Earth
Seen from space,
And its blade twirls on the ice of the skating rink
In the dark. There is no point
In trying to think about this
Bliss.
21. THE ELEVEN DIMENSIONS
The images received are
One light-year old.
That has been confirmed.
On the monitor is
A wide boulevard of black
Lacquer in a capital.
A faint fuzz
Of spring blur coats the trees.
The headlights on in the rain must be
Their eyes.
The trees are the dogs
We know so little about
That they walked.
We have no idea what
Language they used
And did they use their mouths to excrete
What then was
Capitalized
To produce the malt
Which reproduced the songs?
They knew there were
More than three dimensions
To their wives.
Every year they called it spring.
They practiced herd individualism
And ran alone together.
Every headlight drank an evening cocktail
And didn’t drive.
They knew there were
Eleven dimensions,
Which they didn’t know
Were about to begin.
22. THE ROYAL PALM
The tiny octopus
Of galaxies and dust is
The universe taking up
Space.
The octopus also is
The black space around itself
Its octopus ink
Clones in clouds.
Its round human eye is looking
Out at nothing.
Its eight tentacles
Are fingering ink-jet spacetime.
It squirts the self
Around itself it floats in.
It opens its eight arms wide.
It opens its eye and mouth and suckers wide.
It is an eight-armed dome and does.
It is the universe and is.
It is the royal palm
Of consciousness slightly swaying above the beach.
Angels are swimming
In the sea.
Manta rays ripple by
Nearby.
The interstellar dust
Keeps incubating life.
The oral
Sharks are always having fun.
One tank at the aquarium
Of nothingness
Contains all this
Zest.
23. FAINT GALAXY
I come from
Far away from you
And that is
Far away.
Hundreds of
Millions of stars in a
Galaxy and billions of galaxies and one
Billions of light-years away.
I came from
Far away from you
And that was
Far away.
My news is billions
Of light-years ago. When
I started to come toward
You.
And somewhere
Along the way. I
Forget
What I was going to say.
I came from
Far away from you and
That is far
Away.
The light
That reaches you now
Is I
Began far off.
That touches your eyes.
That enters your thought.
From afar.
From the start.
24. EDWARD WITTEN
Witten is designing
A baby’s bib
With a little red
Sea horse raised
Embroidered emblem. Now
When baby spits out the baby food paste
The universe is spooning into her face
A little red sea horse will catch it.
A little red
Sea horse is eleven-dimensional
Spacetime. It unicycles
Upright in space
In all directions
At once.
A little thread sea horse
Is deaf,
Blind, can’t smell,
Has no voice.
The universe
Is also raised
On a background of something else,
And the something else
Is there to catch something
Else.
It will catch hell
For the unfathomable inhuman
Daring of the theory
The heroic Edward Witten
At the Institute for Advanced Study
Has put forward in the Theory of Everything
To the effect
That we spill.
25. THE BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSE
The perfect petals
Of the rose
Of time, of all three
Angels that prepare for this,
Of everything the blue
Warm water does
To magnify the August hour,
The perfect
Thunder mint
Between the thumb and finger
Makes, or the large smell of rain before it rains,
Grow from several storm cells
Violently,
While the hour
Hand sweeps as if it were barking seconds
And the day stands still,
In perfect bloom,
And so the universe
Was just conceived,
And just arrives,
And jets a rising fountain
Lit with many lights
And colors,
And a rushing sound,
And it is night,
And it is air,
And the ice cream is infinite
Above the cone
The small hand holds
Dripping, holds the torch
Of everything
Is good.
26. STARLIGHT
To return to the impossible
Is to be happy in the future
With what after all was the start
And continues to produce.
You know what that means?
It means you are in love.
It means to live your life
You have to.
The universe is ourself
Moving in sleep
Very slowly or in sudden
Seizures toward eternal life.
The universe is a single organism
Made of two
Or more individual,
Or many more than two, individual
Moving parts and blitzkrampf,
Explosive but balletic slow-mo
Of vast organs
Of ecstasy making sounds
The radio telescopes will hear
Billions of light-years from now,
The way whales croon
Whalesong through the ocean microphone
To an audience in darkness far away.
To live your life
You have to use it up.
A star performs its nuclear core.
Beautiful Kate Valk of the Wooster Group
Of actors does the male title role in The Emperor Jones
In blackface till she is so much
Starlight she stops.
27. QUANTUM MECHANICS
It is raining on one side
Of the street and
A mother on the other.
Boy, it’s hot!
Incandescence not making sense,
The ultimate
The weather will
Allow.
Of the energy
Of a supernova the
Undertow
Collapses to,
It has been said
There is no way to
Express the utterly
Unlighted
Out the other side.
It can appear out of nowhere
Outside your own front door.
Knock, knock.
Come in. It’s open.
Delivery!
Come in, it’s open.
Fifteen billion light-years is fast food
To the divine quantum equations
It is delivered to—
Which eat the delivery boy,
According to Heisenberg.
They have charm
And quark and spin.
They work both sides of the street.
They give good infinity.
28. IT IS THE MORNING OF THE UNIVERSE
It is the morning of the universe:
Black children on their way to school to read.
The storefront metal gates on rollers rise
And all the shops are open now for praise.
It’s hard to bear the beauty.
The traffic is sweet this early.
The old are up and listen,
Though the ones who don’t get up don’t listen.
Even in a universe this young
Things ask why
Enormous stars blow up
And more stars are born.
Born to burn,
They start to cry.
The young stars burn and shine.
That’s the law.
As for the mania of being always
On,
It consumes the nuclear core
And beams truth through space
As deeply as a child reads his first real book.
When they assemble the biggest telescope ever
On the far side of the skin,
They will be able to see
A boy not moving his lips
And a book being read,
Free of the wobbles
Of earth atmosphere distortion.
Stars collide and explode
And their young are born.
The children arrive at school.
A billion years go by.
Poems 1959-2009 Page 11