We play young for a day: wander
the Museum of Natural History
to chance out the Big Bang,
choose our favorite stars, and
chew up the edges of the universe like goldfish.
Later, we read children’s stories
in the back of Barnes & Noble:
the bedtime of the moon, the bird
asking for his mother, the umbilical whine
for genesis, that chicken-egg dilemma
of Madonna or child, the primordial caterpillar
which rests on the seventh day after the feast.
Back then, it was so easy to understand!
We had just done it ourselves. Teething
galaxies. The pacifiered planetary breast.
The way the greedy universe exploded into acceleration,
the way electrons and nuclei found each other,
the way a caterpillar swells from existence to more existence.
We are all so very hungry and looking for our mothers.
After sex, I cry over our appetite. Was it birth, that singularity,
Adam and Eve souped into accidental nucleosynthesis?
Or was it all one caterpillar’s hunger,
first for one red apple, and then for metamorphosis?
I whisper upwards like an unhappy snow globe:
the further away you are, my favorite star,
the faster you are moving away from me.