I. CENTO*
Heaven is a place where nothing
ever happens
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
no traveler returns -
Ubiquitous scintillation? - a wild flower?
Let my heart be still a moment
and this mystery explore
Eternity in an hour
The wonder of something more
*Byrne/Shakespeare/Yevtashenko & Blake/Poe/Blake/Watson
II.
Infinite dream splits the night
Ten thousand flashing shards of light
Swirling, curling primordial stew
Then a witch's brew of talking heads
Who claimed with crystal clarity
The beginning - an evolution for
This elusive singularity:
On the Heavens Aristotle divined
Earth's eternal center - forever and serene
As the "First Cause" ofThe City of God
In the prayers of Saint Augustine -
Time has a beginning
Ptolemy sets it spinning
Wheels within wheels within wheels
Copernicus' sun takes center stage
As clerics bark at his heels
Galileo scopes Jupiter's moons
Circling its mighty girth
Myth loses ground
The church dogs howl
"The cosmos does not circle the Earth?!!"
The Purist notions tainted
Much to Kepler's chagrin
Perfect circles are out
Elliptical orbits, in
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Arrogant and brilliant - Newton's new galactica
Pissed off and promising, a rude initiation
But there's an apple for the master
of Universal gravitation
Spinning clouds gather and bulge
Collecting dust in space
Nebular Theory reclaims the sun -
In the solar plan of Kant and Laplace
Relatively speaking
The universe gains intensity
Isaac rolls over in his grave
With Einstein's infinite density
A distant past set stars adrift
It all expands in Hubble's "Red Shift"
Gamow's "Ylem" - marks the spot
In the face of Hoyle's hot harangue
There is no beginning as this "Big Bang!"
Then what's all the noise? speaks the next revelation
Penzia and Wilson's "background radiation"
More supposition, a brighter clue
Hell, its big bang residue!
Sucked back to black -
Everything goes -
The gravity sump pump
Of Hawking and Penrose
Beyond knowing, a zone so odd
Heaven's black hole -
A singularity of God
III.
Physics belies faith
There is no knowing -
no slide rule to calculate
This amorphous dimension
Religion belies reason
There is no faith -
no dogma to fathom
This glorious heaven
In the beginning there was the word?
Then more words to come
Equally absurd as here upon this page
Before the beginning?
Before Ylem
Before some initial rage
Set things spinning out of control
Before women
Before men
Before time
Even then
Before matter
Or space
Or energy or more
Before, before -
Before?
What trace is left
To divine the first cause
The prime mover
The great I Am
Who knows?
God's Machiavellian nightmare
You suppose?
Paradise Lost in the storm of free will
What was He thinking?
Or still, better yet -
What was She thinking?
Fickle Gaea
A woman's convolutions
The true serpent in the Garden of Eden
Making ablutions of fire
Wrapped around the Tree of Knowledge
Giving birth to roots of desire
IV.
Yet still, in the day to day
Far beneath heaven's dome
Lies a quiet place free of thought
Where sometimes we go home
A blissful space past belief
That assures we're not alone -
The ecstasy of childbirth or
A lover's embrace when passion is sated
The full belly that hungers no more
Or a mourner's memory when grief has abated -
Doing without doing
A state of being, a state of grace
Where the mind is quiet, the body rests pliant
And the heart shines through the face
Before the beginning
Before heaven above
Or hell below burning
Before Ylem, is the place of love
In the stardust of Returning
