What’s More . . .
who was the woman who, 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years ago,
birthed the universe from a bang? what an extravagant nativity,
what an immense and unruly child came forth, unfurling,
emerging in the space it made
how could she have imagined how singular and varied her child would become,
how extraordinary, how expansive, how crammed with darkness and light,
bulging with multitudes of whims and trajectories, how
creative and destructive in cosmic tantrums, blowing itself apart
in an inner life of psychotic episodes of collapses and collisions
of psychic arguments, mergers, its gravities contesting, warring,
yanking part from part, captivating them in inevitable attractions,
incarcerating them in humiliating orbits
how could the mother of the universe have imagined
what would become of her child,
how it would grow past comprehension
compounding the vastness of nothing
in its creation of time.
—what’s more, how could we, her child’s
chronically egotistical mites imagine?
Jim Culleny, © 4/29/23