Tim Laffey- A Poem

Even Green Must Go

In the beginning, we have it,

was the word, but in the

end? In the end there

may be only     a

word.

If that. Which?

Can’t say. I like

green.

This story begins with Edwin Hubble,

excitedly peering through the alluringly

named Hooker telescope, then the world’s

largest, at Mount Wilson Observatory,

night after night measuring a detected

red shift in the far flung galaxies

speeding away through space, the further

out, the faster they flew. So many

drunks fleeing a hit and run. Or john’s

scattering from a police sweep? Most

did not accept galaxies outside our

galaxy then, ever the theme of eroded

centrality. After a brief period of doubt,

it became a sort of cause célèbre,

a scandal even. Peoples’ mouths would

water when they said it, as they often

do when hinting at forbidden things.

And no one, high up on the nerd scale,

had a clue why this would be happening.

Though all agreed it’s implications

were, well, disturbing. Hubble raised

a Christian, later became agnostic.

That center could not hold for him.

Eventually scientists came to a conception

of dark matter and the even darker,

dark energy. They had to do something

for their funding. This was a way of saying,

without saying, low voiced, with a look away,

we don’t know, but it’s got

to be something causing it. The consensus

was that space itself was growing.

Did that mean each empty

was getting emptier or there was

just more empty to go around?

Perhaps each empty following a form

of mitosis, was splitting into

two other empties? As if there was

a shortage of empty.

dark     dark     dark

            dark                 big

dark                 empty

big       empty             

I have been noticing a similar

red shift in modern writing.

The distance between sentences

is also growing ever larger.

The space between the period and

a subsequent capital has changed,

gotten larger, spread out somehow

and it is easier to lose our way there.

Ideas that would have followed closely

in the past, no longer do

so. One can jump from popcorn

to penicillin and no one thinks a

thing about it.

Surrealism is a prism of

schisming isms.

Every single thing, entity, atom,

quark, in the universe will eventually

be so far separated from every

other thing, pebble, president, zebra, snake,

with all this new empty getting made,

that no knowledge of, no

interaction among, those anything

elses, will long be possible.

it’s

over

                        the

            horizon

with entity

identity

And I have to wonder if this

won’t happen to words as well. As

our sentences speed apart so do our words.

Parts of speech, no longer parts

of anything, prepositions winking out

as their dependence on missing objects

withers their will to live. Adjectives,

adverbs, verbs flying off, until only nouns

survive, lonely and isolate.

Not

right away but they will

also eventually

decay

to

single

letter

s.

Punctuation having melted like snow.

Think of it, even green is dependent

on nouns, green eyes, green

leaves, green thumb and cannot

survive separation from these things.

Without them, it has no existence.

There is no green

that isn’t some thing green,

so even green must go

into      a          biggest             darkest                       

emptiest

empty

say

good

b y

e