With the oldest bodies of light
we can see shreds of beginning matter,
what came before
there was any light at all
and, in that vast state
gusts of fog, mist, grayish gases
thinned to ribbons and strips
vaguely reigned. This was genesis
not quite free of her past.
When the earliest stars appeared
one by one, each illumined
clump and flame-hoard forged
a distant fate. Some
warmed awhile, then waned.
Some grew hot over time.
Some drew a molten fortune
from whatever lit remnants they could,
reeling faster. Some lost control
and flailed to fiery tentacles
clutching backward—they left visual shrieks.
Those with a future in emptiness
bulged from a self-scalding core
but rounded their own reactions
in the iron of perfect spheres.
Their blue-red lesser fires
brightened to white heat, white as an eye
looking out on terrain unknown,
still clouded. These were the eyes,
just opened, of the seer shocked
to recognize such distortion, such lack
of clarity. How much still to be done!
Thus chewing the matter over
another, and another, was born
in a chain of increasing vision.
Each new gaze broke the grayish drifts
afresh. The background shifted its bits,
the foggy veils dissolved
in widening rings of heat
as stars, suns, other brilliancies
(like eyes as well) resolved to burn.
Eventually, the seers cleared
this place of ambiguity
or portions of it. They made it an active black,
colder, but seeded with galaxies,
composed of bright and dark,
night and day.
There were chances for cosmic wrecks
but for substance too, and order.
Now, shreds of those first mists
occasionally pass
across the oldest source of light
more potent than a billion of our suns.
If we look hard and fast
we can see them.