Before the End of Time
for Brian Greene
Last night the moon shone so near, it seemed
a neighbor’s yard had flung its sundial skyward:
time to give a proper send-off to the cosmos —
before the gaseous bounce-house of our sun
implodes, helium’s obese nuclei displacing
hydrogen’s fly-weight protons, like the sand
toddlers add to a pail of ocean; before gravity
gets an upper hand, and the core collapses
and its fever spikes, white heat lighting out
and searing Mercury into its cremains; before
Venus, coy girl, is done in or isn’t (scenarios
vary), and Mars spins off to fight another day;
before the Big Four, in the bleacher seats,
trade quips in secret on these passing stages;
before the whole damn solar system goes
cold/hot/cold/hot for five billion years;
before this warm noon light on my arm
turns white dwarf, icy orb faded to black —
a gentle end, all told. But us: how could I
leave out Earth? — our thunder and geese
and Dixie cups and vice and goldenseal,
Venus’s fraternal twin, charred or frozen,
become a bald globe, home to no one
home, even the timeless dead gone extinct …
Flash a Googleplex forward to The Big Rip,
Big Freeze, Big Crunch, Big Bounce; or,
believe it or not, Big Slurp. After the last
black hole has swallowed its fatal tea cup
of entropy; after all horizons cease to be
events, or vice versa; after … Well, why
go there at all? O null cliff-face, where
there’s no sheer fall to fear, O zero sum,
O heaven on empty, void even of fumes,
your time come, eternity, don’t take long.