Examination of Faith (And the Big Bang)

First, you need to imagine

a room.  The room

is empty.

There are no chairs.

There is no coat rack,

no pair of shoes

set neatly by the door.

There is no door.

Ok, technically

there isn’t a floor, either.

Or walls.

Or a ceiling.

But it helps

to imagine them anyway

(for context).

So, in the room,

the only thing at all

is a marble.

This is where the faith part comes in.

The marble, it’s just there.

I can’t explain

how it got there

(or when),

all I know

is that everything

is in that marble.

By “everything,”

I mean every

thing.  Your breakfast?

It’s there.  Even the banana.  And your mother,

Albuquerque, the Mona Lisa (painting and person) and galaxy Abell 1835 IR1916.

Nikola Tesla,

he’s there,

same with the Sun, quasars, other scientific-sounding things; the 1983 Heisman Trophy awarded to Mike Rozier? sure,

and glazed old fashioned donuts (all of them);

maybe not the things themselves, but the matter

they’d someday be made from, every atomy and whatnot; it’s

poetry, really,

it is

the interconnectedness of all events, objects, people, places

in this non-metaphorical form on this imaginary floor.

Got it?

So,

after sitting there

since forever

or since the moment it existed

(either way: since the beginning),

it goes “bang”

so big

everything spins into being, particles

stretching their arms and bumping

into one another here and there in this newfound thing called “space,”

this new nothing between one another, making

Jupiter, Robert Frost, the Ogallala Aquifer, you know the drill,

every

thing

in the places they congregate.

And scientists,

they sit in silence

of the darkest nights

in their slit-top cathedrals,

they listen at the sky,

ears turned reverently to all

there is

to find.

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“Examination of Faith (And the Big Bang)” appears in my third book: I Have A Poem The Size of the Moon