In the Cruelty of Humans and the Forgetfulness of Dreams

In the cruelty of humans
And the forgetfulness of dreams,
In the mysteries of zero
And whole impossibility,

In the absurd acrobatics
Of the art of infinities,
In the all-connecting weakness
That smoothly bends to gravity,

Reason finds itself alien,
An alien both resident
And native child of this country,
With no notion why it should feel

Orthogonal to its own world.
Under a mulberry at night,
Between summer and early fall,
Wind tossing silhouetted leaves,

A delivery truck grunting
At the end of its supply chain
Somewhere out in the parking lots,
This courtyard dark enough for stars

Despite the local, conjured lights,
Dusty ribbon and meteors
Between the outlines of the cliffs,
Consider that eternity

Was once believed a property
Of mountains like these, of seasons
Like this, of nightly rotation,
Of those eternally fixed stars

You now measure candling, birthing,
Burning, collapsing, and dying,
A supernova of knowing.
Could it be? Could it be someday

You will make a discovery,
With our help, of course, with numbers,
All our technologies of signs,
That even your core eternals

Are not? If gravity could be
Changing, bending at different rates,
If, in cosmic history,
There’s evidence the rules aren’t rules,

That there are ways to understand
How to divide all sorts of things
By nothing after all, if all
Postulates, like epicycles,

Elegant as they were, proved soft,
And all spheres of laws elastic,
It might soothe the rage of humans.
You might no longer need bad dreams.