Weâre 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.
Â
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, didnât 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.
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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 isnât 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.
Â
20. HAPPINESS
It isnât every day, but most,
That one inflicts this on oneself.
It is intolerable.
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.
Â
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 didnât drive.
They knew there were
Eleven dimensions,
Which they didnât know
Were about to begin.
Â
22. THE ROYAL PALM
The tiny octopus
Of galaxies and dust is
The universe taking
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.
Â
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, didnât 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.
Â
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 isnât 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.
Â
20. HAPPINESS
It isnât every day, but most,
That one inflicts this on oneself.
It is intolerable.
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.
Â
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 didnât drive.
They knew there were
Eleven dimensions,
Which they didnât know
Were about to begin.
Â
22. THE ROYAL PALM
The tiny octopus
Of galaxies and dust is
The universe taking
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