31

My birth no one remembers—

The cries of my mother, my father

Away for his business,

No record of who first said “God” to me,

Who rubbed the date on my mouth,

Pattern of light through arched windows,

The scents in the air—uncles and aunts

Have no memory.

But the birth of the cosmos—the heat

And the densities follow equations,

The temperature 1.5 × 10¹⁰ degrees at one second.

Twelve billion years

In the past, all began:

Time formed from nothingness,

Space formed from nothingness,

Universe born by some chance, or not,

Moment of ripe probabilities,

One of uncountable eggs.

And then the explosion,

The energies opening space

And the boiling of light

In the Bang without eye without ear.

And this is a cosmos of endings,

Billions of years in the future

As gauged by the mass and the speed

And the clock of the flight of the galaxies.

Billions of years in the future,

The galaxies, caught in the ocean of space,

Sail apart as the cosmos expands

And the density dwindles to nothing.

Th e stars spend their energies,

Light fades and dims,

And the galaxies ghost ships

Adrift on an infinite sea,

With no heat, with no life.

But the numbers remain.