Small Universe

There were eighty-eight

glistening constellations

draping a night sky

across my back porch

with eighty-eight spiders

flaunting fat bottoms

and midges, gnats, flies, all

streaming into black holes:

just a slight hint of the tragic

sense of life in all its glory

then the eternal silence round

the back of the eighty-eight

constellations terrified me a little

and had me scuttling back indoors.

                 * * *

Reviews

[Eilis]

I like that this begins as a sort of light-hearted poem--star-gazing and insect watching, and then becomes the weight of the unknown. When I was in university, I took an astronomy course and we had to listen to space noise as part of a larger assignment. Not sure if you've ever listened to that, but, your last two stanza made me think of how I felt upon hearing. You expect silence, but it's more this chaos and that is a shock. There's the idea or story of something out there, but if that is true, than what does that mean for us. And what the hell is that sound. The mystery.

I think when we encounter the fact of our own smallness, it becomes something to run from. Your poem expresses that in a fun and eloquent way and helps to temper the terror a little (in my mind). As ever, your words carefully measured and your precise pictures to open the idea out. I appreciate those qualities in your poetry. I do admire your work, Gerald.

[Gerald Parker]

That's a superb summing up of my little poem, thank you, Eilis. I had originally only written the first eight lines - I've been obsessed with the huge cobwebs out side my back door. There's a security light next to it which attracts lots of insects and the spiders have a "whale" of a time. Then somehow I thought of referring to Unamuno's "Tragic Sense of Life" - not that I've read it, but the title says it all, and then I thought about Pascal being terrified by the eternal silence of space. He obviously didn't have the benefit of being able to listen to noises from deep space. If he had, he would probably still have been terrified. Regards, Gerald.