To Probe the Impenetrable

Athens, Georgia

July 13, 2014

“Behind it all is surely an idea so simple, so beautiful, that when we grasp it - in a decade, a century, or a millennium - we will all say to each other, how could it have been otherwise?”  

“In any field, find the strangest thing and explore it.”  

- John Archibald Wheeler

Pierce the veil and plunge 

beneath the scale of seeing. 

Probe impenetrable horizons 

and peer at the echo of origins. 

Corral the ghost that animates 

the spell of elegance that looks 

on all as made of strings, looped 

and coiled on 9-D branes, 

excited to the higher harmonics 

in a manifold landscape of quark 

and gluon, EM waves, and fields 

that warp space…

He has shown thee, O man, just 

what is good and what required. 

                          … Oh do not 

feign a humble pose. We stole 

the fruit, now find the cipher 

and call ourselves clever. If all

arose from empty void and we 

the fragile wisp of naught  

evolved to render the real; if 

awareness dances with truth — 

then let us feast on forbidden 

fruit and live forever, serenaded 

by a spare tune, not quite harsh,
played dolce on the cosmic harp.