singularity

it's long been my habit,
after the bedside lamp
is off, and the late-night
comics silenced, to
open the blinds in
the bedroom

so that when (and not if)
I awaken in the night,
instead of the sickly green
lcd of an alarm piercing
my blurred vision,
I see the gentle
blue-white glow
of innumerable stars
from countless galaxies,
the beginning of time
shining down on me

According to general relativity, the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe started as a singularity, where all the universe was a single point. (wikipedia.org)

newton’s classical physics
too staid to grasp
the discrepancies
(that you and I
couldn’t hope to
comprehend anyway)
holding dearly to
nothing from nothing
forms reborn, energy remains
neither created nor destroyed
a safe and intuitive world
utterly, maddeningly
incorrect

you don’t need to understand something
for it to be true

It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no "around" around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can't even ask how long it has been there--whether it has just popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there forever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn't exist. There is no past for it to emerge from. (Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything)

like the good idea
of love
the strongest,
most nonsensical
force, born from
tiny electric sparks--
synapses firing
within a pink, unfeeling mass

I felt nothing for you,
there was no gaping hole
in my life where you might fit
until

And, so, from nothing, our universe begins. (ibid)

your world is not mine
if I can’t see you
or feel you
you are not here
my days made infinitely
easier, quieter, still

One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe--that we're just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call a "false vacuum" or "a scalar field" or "vacuum energy"--some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. (ibid)

a measure of instability,
like the school-girl tingle
when I daydream
of your hand cupped
behind my neck,
the weight of a collapsing
star pulling me to you
the notions of right/wrong
logic/emotion
thankfully
out of the mix

It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. (ibid)

evident proof
yet I’m still not convinced
that I can get by
forgetting

the clatter of
domestic duties
biding time
for the next instability

It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. Or it may be that space and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang--forms too alien for us to imagine--and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can't understand to one we almost can. (ibid)

looking out a window,
imagining the cool air--
long removed
from the intimacy
of a pure,
cloudless night,
I watch the moon,

knowing the phases,
thinking it should be nearly full
but an off-shape crescent hangs
in the east

saying nothing,
cradling a sleeping boy,
I consider,
for a second or two,
the strangeness of it,

the obvious explanation
does not occur to me

then it’s time
to sing the boy
a lullaby
and lay him
in his crib

These are very close to religious questions. (ibid)

the love of a boy
the pull of a man
and I fail to notice
my planet sliding
between
the sun and the moon
just like this life
gone in minutes