“Microcosmology” by Lee Rossi

Lee Rossi

MICROCOSMOLOGY

Everything fits into everything else.
We know that who come bursting
from our mothers in a gush of being,
our children already nestled in sacs
tucked safely inside. Infinite regression
sends us back into the womb
after womb from which we grew.
There was a soup, we’re told,
where the first living creatures
were brewed, not something you’d
eat, but eat it they apparently did
until little was left but waste
oxygen and each other.
How long did they take to find
a taste for those other squirming
thingies—eat it or fuck it,
and in which order, the rush
to colonize never stopped.
Except in our imagination,
we can’t stuff ourselves
back into that ever-expanding bottle,
which itself was once just something
infinitely dense, unimaginably hot,
and before that not even not.

from Rattle #57, Fall 2017

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Lee Rossi: “Ever since my friend Tim water-bombed the Dean of Discipline and I memorialized the incident in rhyming stanzas (think ‘The Highwayman’), much to the delight of my seminary classmates, I’ve been hooked, poetry being the poor man’s heroin, junk for those who like their highs vicarious.”

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