Why.

The reason you do not clearly understand the time being is that you
think of time only as passing.
              Dogen (1200–1253) 

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.
              Wallace Stevens, “Man Carrying Thing”

Winter Solstice—the sun
stopped for a moment—
can you feel its light stretching—
as it shrugs off its migration
and turns back north toward the pole?

                   * * *

On this rock, just the right
distance from the nearest star,
sheltered by Jupiter and kept in season
by the steadying moon,
being moves through my body
like clouds, arriving in one shape,
drifting off as another.

I don’t remember being born,
only the great dog
whose fur I clung to
before the first day of school.

Memory accounts
for space, not time.
It records the quality and angle
of light, the keen, metallic scent of wind
through porch screens—the wailing
as it rises—the warmth and texture of air—
the weather and sometimes
whether or not it was a Tuesday,
but never how long it lasted—or
how many years ago—only
how it felt—alone in that moment.
And the sound of waves breaking.

We see time past as Euclidian—moments
of solitude with no date affixed—
long afternoons of childhood in no time at all,
without knowing that
because of the moment—now in memory—
you will always be seven in that place.

Our solitude—being alone
with the one you knew there—
our loneliness—being there
without him.

Two billion seconds of life
now, on a planet only
four and a half billion years
old—and every atom on loan
to it much older than that.

In the beginning, all that was
was too hot for atoms -- too tightly
packed to let go of its light --
as if the universe
had come out of the other side of a black hole --
heading back to where it began
over ungraspable distance
right now -- and not at all
far from home.

Every creation story I know
comes out of the dark --
the brune garden in which light blooms.
Dark matter puling the chaotic
energy apart -- breaking the prison
of its own concentration --

giving it space to be a wave.

                   * * *

The master equation
of the Standard Model of particle physics
accounts for everything
except gravity -- and gravity
accounts for everything --
irresistible center of the spheres
and stars, on and among which
we go on -- curving our
straight course -- as it draws
the low-gliding hawk
irresistibly
back together with its shadow.

Imagine Earth
as the nucleus of a hydrogen atom
from which we're looking out -- hoping
for a glimpse of the single electron
whirling around in its orbit
and -- like Neptune -- simply too
distant to see -- green pea
in a green field a half-mile away.

Now in confusion -- now
in a wave -- a thousand blackbirds
rise and veer above a stubble field --
their wings like obsidian in the sun.

Illusory solidity of the world
and things -- the chair I'm on --
its atoms whizzing in arcs,
repelling each other while I sit
musing in this electromagnetic storm --
a chair.

So much space inside an atom,
why can't I reach through this wall?
Is a honeybee
one being, or an element
of one being?

Particles -- shadows of waves
in water moving over bright sand.

                   * * *

As a child I witnessed a tiny sort of
particle accelerator
in the cold, blue light
of The Lone Ranger
on black-and-white TV -- a beam
of electrons through a cathode tube
splayed out by a magnet to become
Tonto and Silver crossing
a phosphorescent screen.

Every particle in their bodies represnets
the distillation of 100
billion bits from the big bang that
immolated themselves
to become light.

Now even quantum theory agrees,
Form Is Emptiness -- mostly.

                   * * *

In the glimmering domain
of the Summer Triangle -- buoyed up
by crickets and frogs --
Vega drags her rhomboid harp
through an isthmus in the Milky Way.

We need our quietest hours to hear Earth
turning night into day --
to feel it gather its waters against
the pull of the moon --

hydrogen holding waters together,
and we -- made mostly of water --
hydrogen molecules drawn to each other --
wrapping up a bit of breathable
air in their hydraulic embrace --
holding me together, and you,
with a little oxygen drawn in.

                   * * *

How is it that an atom of hydrogen --
the primary substance we all know --
can be said to weigh less
than the sum of its parts,
and does that mean that the total mass
of the known universe -- mostly hydrogen --
would weigh less if we could weight it
all together at once?

                   * * *

Matter appears to be jealous of light --
every particle mad to escape its mass
to be just the light by which we
see our world -- without self --
without the distractions of a you
and a me, apparently eternal
like an electron -- to have
no substance in which to decay.

The mysterious shore across the great void --
a scary place from all you've heard,
all you've imagined --
never quite clearly in view,
and no one you know
has been there.
And how with you endure your thoughts
in the great dark absence
of everything you've known?

Like the terminals of the battery
in a lamp,
matter and antimatter
cancel each other out
to become light.
Why anything at all should exist
is a riddle we haven't yet solved.

                   * * *

Going and coming, the full moon
and rising sun
greet each other
across the plane of the morning.
"Till later," says the moon.
"I'll be along," says the sun.
"I'll be around," says the earth.
"Take your time."

                   * * *

Near the pole
the needle of the magnetic compass
spins like drain water
in its dying frenzy --
finally so close to home.

Dan Gerber