Poems 1959-2009 (13 page)

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.

 

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
.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

It is the invisible

Dark matter we 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.

 

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.

 

I was thinking about dogs

To fight death.

They get hold of it by the teeth and can

Go on forever.

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.

 

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.

 

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!

 

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.

 

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,