Chapter One

    INTO THE EMPTINESS

Into the emptiness that weighs

More than the universe

Another universe begins

Smaller than the last.

Begins to smaller

Than the last.

Dimensions

Do not yet exist.

My friend, the darkness

Into which the seed

Of all eleven dimensions

Is planted is small.

Travel with me back

Before it grows to more.

The church bell bongs,

Which means it must be noon.

Some are playing hopscotch

Or skipping rope during recess,

And some are swinging on swings,

And seesaws are seesawing.

That she is shy,

Which means it must be May,

Turns into virgin snow

And walking mittened home with laughing friends.

And the small birds singing,

And the sudden silence,

And the curtains billow,

And the spring thunder will follow--

And the rush of freshness,

And the epileptic fit that foams.

The universe does not exist

Before it does.

II

MIRROR FULL OF STARS

A can of shaving cream inflates

A ping-pong ball of lather,

Thick, hot, smaller than an atom, soon

The size of the world.

This does take time to happen.

Back at the start

Again, a pinprick swells so violently

It shoots out

Hallways to other worlds,

But keeps expanding

Till it is all

There is. The universe is all there is.

Don't play with matches.

The candle flame follows her

With its eyes. The night sky is a mirror

On a wall.

What she stands in front of are the roaring afterburners

Of the distant stars a foot away

Leaving for another world. They have been summoned

To leave her

For another girl

In another world who stands there looking

In a mirror full of stars

At herself in her room.

The room is not really,

But it might be. If there is

Something else as beautiful

As this snow softly falling outside, say.

The universe begins

With a hot ball of lather expanding

In a hand

That should be in her bed asleep.

III

WHO THE UNIVERSE IS

The opposite of everything

That will be once

The universe begins

Is who it is.

Laws do not apply

To the pre-universe.

None of it

Does not make sense.

Puffs to the size

Of an orange in one single stunned

Instant

From smaller than a proton.

Morning coffee black

Happiness so condensed

Had to expand to this,

Had to expand to this,

Had to expand to this

Universe of love

Of freezing old

Invisible dark matter

To give it gravity.

If the hot unbelievable

Nothingness feeds

Itself into a hole and starts,

None of this does not make sense

Once you understand

The stars are who it is,

The sisters and the brothers.

Set the toaster setting between Light and Dark

And the unimaginable

Pre-universe will pop up a slice of strings

In eleven dimensions which balloons.

Copyright © 2000 Frederick Seidel. All rights reserved.