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
