Classic Poem

You've lived in the universe
(or some kind of verse)
some number of years. Been told
this and that about it. And now,
having stepped outside in the dark,
you look up at it yourself.

... Best done at this time of year
in the stupendous clarity
zero cold gives, as though
the dome of intervening air
were frozen into a lens
bringing everything nearer
and brighter — Lyra, Orion, Draco,
The Bear, hard to discern
in the blizzards of littler stars
now visible in and among them . . . .
And all those (so you've been told)
blowing due outward, an arc
of the Big Bang, the Great
Centrifuge, detonating
into infinity ... Yet —
you can't help noting once more —
in such iron fixity of form
men have watched for a thousand years
the same constellations. . . .

holds them? (You want to ask.)
Moreover, how did wild light,
the aboriginal Einsteinian E ,
vaulting across Nothingness,
get locked into M atter at all?

So you guess at a Gravity more
like James Jeans' electron, com-
prehensible only
as " ... a wish or emotion " : a Gravity
that is not mindless, not mere
Force or mere Torque, but Desire —
like a ruined billionaire's,
to recoup a totality misered
in the black-hole of a negative
forever before Time began — and this
Desire haunting all space, its traplines
like the minefields of Sadam
laid at all points. You posit

Opposed Imperatives, one
outward, the other inward,
a Mazda and Ahriman
like half-billion-mile-an-hour
headwinds to each other,
eddying into atoms,
into the ponderable world

and the ponderable world
marbled with them: the fan
of the peacock, the Iliad
war and peace, politics, everything
to the quasars and beyond,
marbled with them; even love
marbled with them: that Past

that won't let go — its mother-
tongues, memories of place,
moral laws laid down; that Future
that won't let stop —
relentless with mornings
and constant to nothing
but its own velocity. Surely

you've known both, from inside,
like a salmon, fresh water and salt
and the rip between, where the two
tear at each other . . . . You'd

inquire of the learned astronomer
whether lungs and bladder and heart hadn't
the requisite equations: Ex-
pand/Contract . . . . You,
alone there at a point in the cosmos,
Whitman-like, looking up
" in perfect silence at the stars " — and,
in no disdain of the world,
simply, between Gravity
and Levity, pissing on it one more
question-mark in the snow...