THE BIG WHEEL

Stop! Think.

IN INFINITY EVERYTHING REDUCES TO NOTHING:
The heavens a mist, your God a blip,
all existence a freak of light and shadow.
Nothing is punier than arrogance.

This is a clockwork universe. Yet it has no Mainspring,
measures only instantaneousness in perpetuity.
Providence or circumstance—can all this radiance, receding,
simply vanish into nought…
The big wheel turns the lesser wheels;
the lesser wheels, the stars.
The stars roll round those starving hearts
their greater wheels have wrought.

Galaxies fling their bristles wide,
spattering flame on a canvas boundless, artless,
imponderable. Within these wheels a prodigy quests,
spinning in pitch and timelessness,
forever falling round a warm mother sun.

My world is staggeringly beautiful.

In evening she murmurs, post-mourning she sings.
Her heart is all creation, her hearth a planet wide.
Each tremor of birthing, each strumming of wings,
aches to the rhythms of season and tide:  leaves follow sun,
winds scatter rain. Streams rush to bed, to the lullaby of sea.
You blood or brine or fluke or fate—
Is this one sweet fire just one more torch in passing.
The heavens yawn above us, the clockwork shrinks below…
in molecules are…galaxies becoming…
greater, lesser, up and down:  all things bend to math and mind.
Yet,
in Infinity,
Everything adds up to—

NOTHING!

Chimeras breed in peepholes,
where tiny wheels are wrought.
These wee wheels spin their smaller wheels;
the smaller wheels, the jots.
The jots chum from the mocking depths,
and vanish into nought…