a
In the beginning the Hand
filled the void with darkness, spilling it,
like a pour of mustard grains, black, unceasing,
massy and weightless, fluid but not liquid,
from the within upon the without,
from the without into the within.
All then was One and moved inside its movelessness
like a slow dark dream gliding across a sleep,
like a note augmenting inside a chord unchanged,
like a wave without node or anode.
Silence and darkness were sufficient, the void
sufficient unto itself,
the Hand had no need of mind;
all was sufficient to all other.
All being known, there could be no knowledge.
When then did loneliness begin to know?
Perhaps the Hand closed into a fist
and openness shut inward
and what was One became a one amid all other ones,
became knowable and implied a mind that knows.
That would be a serious falling-off:
the gods would become inevitable and forces abstract
and terrible, time and distance and velocity
imposing their shapes where shape had been irrelevant.
Duration would spawn mortality
and the vessels of mortality would live and die
in that moment of aberration of the void
we would name Light.
b
In the beginning, Darla Hamrick
insensibly imitates the methods of God,
establishing with a streak of black Crayola,
edge to edge halfway up the page,
the Upper and the Lower, founding, that is to say,
a firmament, upon the face of which she moves,
meditating her destruction of the mystical One
requisite to emergence of the familiar Many,
deriving with one stroke multeity from unity,
and looks upon this horizon and finds it good.
Let there be light.
Now comes the sun she draws
as a golden circle with golden spikes
quill-stiff to represent the inflexible c,
the star’s swift javelins of radiance.
These first principles are geometric,
but then arrives the organic realm, a brace
of trees with lettuce heads, side by side
on the right-hand side, rootless
upon the unforgiving horizon’s plane,
steady as concrete, brown as peanut butter,
stalwart to bear the weight of their maelstrom leafage.
To give her system a center she constructs
a scarlet house, rectangular as a brick,
with a heavy roof to press it to the earth
and a chimney that sprouts a bedspring of smoke.
Here is a door that opens with a golden knob
and a window blank but for its central cross.
Next come the human beings,
the mother in red polka dots, the father
sporting an aggressive orange tie,
both with smiles larger than their faces.
And Darla also, in yellow curls, turned
to greet her parents on their birthday.
Then the animal kingdom:
the purple terrier Tam o’ Shanter,
and her older brother Willard, rumply-haired
with crazy eyes, a thorough ruffian,
the tragic flaw in the basics of this universe.
On the left, two birds in flight,
M and W, emphasize the sky’s expansive nature.
Shadows are not permitted: that is Darla’s Law.
And nothing shall ever change. The trees will stand
like chocolate statues with green wigs,
the house is solid on its Crayola plane,
the smiles of Mommy and Daddy are fixed eternally,
the birds are motionless within their blank abyss.
She looks upon this world and finds it good.
c
In the beginning, at Bell Labs,
Penzias and Wilson were keeping tabs
On radio signals from Cass A
And the halo of the Milky Way.
Eliminating anomalies born
Inside their own antenna horn
Where pigeons left, when paying a call,
“White dielectric material,”
The scientists still would always see there
3 degrees K that shouldn’t be there;
So they applied in desperation
To cosmologists for an explanation,
A bunch that often makes things worse
With goofy ideas of the universe.
But this discovery sealed the fate
Of the theory of the steady state
And its perplexing mystery
Of a universe lacking a history;
For, after the usual contentious hassle,
Those three degrees were classed a fossil
Left over from the first explosion
That set the whole damn thing in motion.
Why this happened is a separate topic
Now in the hands of the anthropic
Theorists who take warm pleasure
In positing mankind as the measure
Of all that ever is or was:
We furnish our own Primal Cause--
And justify what Darla draws.
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