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