December 21, 2022Prayer for the Unrung Bell
Only entropy comes easy
—Anton Chekhov
Here’s the good news:
The universe is expanding
faster than it runs to nothing.
The other news: there is no way
to unchew a sandwich, to turn
what’s in our bowels back
to bread and burgers, no way
to cook the burgers back into cows
the buns back to flour and yeast.
We can’t unfroth that yeast or turn
the wheat into soil and water,
nor can we return the cows to being
calves, the calves to mother’s milk,
the milk to cud, the cud to grazing,
the rain to fall up to the clouds.
As for the soil? It is made of the fallen,
the undone, the remains of rotting
flesh, the dust of mountains, all
the ravenous micro-beasts digesting
buried kings and fallen oaks and shoemakers
and shamans and what raptors leave behind—
all these thus consumed called on to
make a bed for seed and root, for waves of grain
for the towering pines we hew
into floors for our homes and pallets
to lie upon and cradles for our babies
who might grow to be poets,
poets who will make whole shattered glass,
unstir honey from hot tea,
praise entropy, lasso receding stars,
and laud heretics who make virtue
from the fragments of a dying cosmos,
disbelieve popes and princes,
and wander to places where no one knows
things fall apart.
They return with a message: There is no
arrow of time. Chaos has a brother who
knows how to turn sandstorms
into skyscrapers.
This must be true or else, how could I rise
each day and greet the raging fires,
the rasping breath of my dying father,
war drums pounding, women stripped
of their babies, glaciers sliding to the sea?
Yet, the cosmos grows possibility
and we and the expanding universe are
hopeful pieces of the always falling apart.
from #77 - Fall 2022