Cosmology, Beyond the Elegant Equations

Athens, Georgia

January 8, 2012; revised November 16, 2015
See first comment for technical notes.

1. Cosmology

                              Once darkness was on the deep, the unformed void outside of time
                           where unmoved mover meditates, quantum foam collapses states
                                                   force fields quiver, random jitters
                                                                           juxtapose            
                                                               cohere in song - a lullaby   
                                                                              arise         
                                                     arise

Erupting

from nothing

to be, its compulsion,

the new baby bubble

from multiverse mother

shatters bonds and breaks away

inflating space near warp speed ten

an instant in, homogeny, divine feng sui

stabilized and granted mass, six epochs passed

in seconds flat, new universe blown light years wide.

Those seconds stretch ten billion years, to be expands

to everything, an instance of the great I am whose moving

hand writes all it can of beauty, truth, and then moves on.

        Soon swallowed by advancing shadow, swelling faster

                       pushing farther, space expands till black holes

                           burst, their guts disperse, their ruins recede,

                                till darkness drives away the ashes, rends

                                               asunder what was wonder, what

                                                         once was expands to void

                                                             from which it came and

                                                                        darkness soothes

                                                                                      the deep

                                                                                           again.

And so it goes. 
Shiva, sewn into space.
Destruction, woven from the womb.
Although the earth will end 
in fire,
our universe is doomed
to ice.

Photograph by David Noah,
Winterville, Georgia

2. Beyond the Elegant Equations

In primitive times the world was a slab 
adorned atop a working turtle 
who stood on a turtle 
who stood on a stack. 
Back then if you asked of the logical trap, 
it was turtles all the way down 

but not now. For equations will tell 
of a universe world which rides on a brane, 
inflates as a bubble 
begat by a bubble. 
Though knowledge is gained, 
the pattern’s the same, it’s bubbles 

all the way back. So blessings to minds 
that trouble and prod 
the harsh holy realm 
that hovers dark waters 
to find the light in hidden depths 
and chase unknowns

with home-spun nets. They stand tall 
on shallow rafts 
and cast their best equations wide 
to sieve deep currents 
with coarse mesh, snagging 
facts but missing flow, 

from whence the mind of love is borne 
from endless void before beginning 
to an age beyond unending, 
in the whole between two voids 
where Mona Lisa starts her smile, 
B Minor Mass awaits its Bach,

and loving-kindness incubates 
the force which binds worlds, 
emerging in yearnings of flesh 
and feathers, scales and silicon, 
whose dwelling haunts the outer 
edge of elegant equations.