Cosmos: A Poem

Imagining Origin

52 IMAGINING ORIGIN I Under the window frame’s sliding shadow cut by the edges which move I feel the whiteness of the page the monk’s rage to still his days among mountains. As I lie upon the counterpane thoughts snow in unspeakable need erasing words toward a geometry of elemental sequence. This idea lines from an event a beginning violently complete in the Big Bang’s heat. I struggle for a spark in myself to illuminate intellect, when all is implied compressed inside— before syntax crosses its distance. I think a new start acute, star-bright as if a first conception of light. So as I imagine first light takes shape from the shape of light in thought. II As I seek a first idea the memory of a star pierces down from afar. 53 Once before timeseparation I was one with myself and my father and the field outside felt new to my feet then bare upon it as I ran the early dew with Babs and my brother. Then when my senses whirled from spinning on grass I waited on hands and knees the one to remain in memories while the turning windows and trees centered on me as axis— making my seeing a nexus of this world with my soul. Aware before sickness I felt this separate whole as breeze on my face, myself as a leaf in its revolving life. The begetting constellated sky above buds of spirea encircled my one inner light— my single first point of view. Now long after, I remember this being, star-like and true to myself and my father. III Transparent transient like materialized thought light courses the universe— 54 a visible splendor whirled creating within its world. A galaxy displays its late red-shifted rays as centering gravity pulls the stars into their spirals. Here as I imagine the plain is almost featureless, counterpane of a bed and of a country suspended at evening. I lie time’s invalid remaking the past— now only skyline, angles of barn-tin reflecting at sundown. IV As the universe expands light from receding stars— dim, red-shifted, bent— belatedly appears. My star-created thought reflects its starting point and distantly understands. Silhouettes, a house and barn shadowed upon the counterpane establish place in space and time— a surface locating my own past and other times to come. 55 My life which felt first light a life ago still lives within the love which was and ever is. ...