Tag Archives: universe

I spoke in riddles

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I spoke in riddles
Indecipherable even to myself
Especially myself

All these words made real
Made manifest

In the beginning
–It said —
Was the word

Indefinable useless
A meaningless jumble of
Sound unless

That hunger not yours but mine
Is the meaning of all of it
Or the infinite cosmos
Of conscious beings

Until the face in the mirror
Sweeps past me into the distance
Unable at last
To recognize the original

I always thought I was some kind of Gypsy
Racing from edge to edge
Never stopping never asking
Weariness my goad and my goal

All will good or bad
Known and unknown
As deep and suspicious
As an autumn breeze in April

Where is it exactly you want to go?
Don’t you know all places are the same?
All contain your ghosts
The dead can’t help you
Any more than the living
You are yours alone

I lived riddles
Myself indecipherable
Especially myself

Ergo

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I think, I feel, therefore it seems
That the world turns only on

My constant spinning,
Only so far as my senses extend
My poor, mineral body, soft and pliable,
Prone to deflation;

That the universe exists solely
For my engagement, to be ingested
Piece by piece,
Or all a-gulp, wantonly;

That time is just the measure of
My preoccupation with one
Or another of my desires
Churned up in the small turmoil of being;

That all ends where I end,
And that all vastness is but an illusion
Of my impatient hunger,
That meaning stops here.

This, despite my earnest protests;
And all the infinite conscious beings
Of the infinite cosmos, too, protest
In vain.

Making

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I know something of making, and I’m here to tell you
If the world was made by some grand carpenter
Somewhere there’s a corner
To which all the error has been pushed

Some joint not quite square
Some depth not quite plumb
Some dark unknown fluke
Covered deftly with cosmic caulk

And one hell of a paint job

As green withers and falls

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As green withers and falls
It’s good to recall those other seasons
So sprung from desolation
Beneath the last and desperate snow

A boon of tenderness
Determined to catch light in its beams
Lifted itself in ignorant jubilation
Here and there, all unaware
Of its own irrelevant and unfailing
Death

All unaware, in its motishness
That such small impertinence
Begins the crack
Of winter’s back

That such improbable spiraling doom
Begets a new and ancient season
Again and again and again
In the deep and undisturbed
Rhythm of the universe

Chance

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…the universe is a big place, where improbable things happen all the time. Look at you.
– John Matson

At its deepest core
Reality is mere chance
A riot of bubbles boiling
And bursting, all unguessed

Unless the ever disappearing
Always borning bodies flung
Into pointless being, seething
In the cosmic whistling teakettle

Unless by the grace of improbability
By statistical nethering whimsy
By the merest intractable stroke
Of lunacy
We come back for the next moment

Again
And
Again