The Big Wheel

Big thinks.

The Big Wheel

One step not taken, one oath not thrown.

Against the night I hurl this stone, my crowning blasphemy:

!!IN INFINITY EVERYTHING REDUCES TO NOTHING!!

The heavens a mist, your God a blip, all existence a freak of light and shadow.

Nothing is punier than arrogance.

This is a clockwork universe. Yet it has no Mainspring,

measures only instantaneity in perpetuity. Damn our intellect,

damn our eyes--how can all this splendor simply vanish into naught?

You see, the Big Wheel turns the lesser wheels; the lesser wheels, the stars.

The stars roll round those numberless hearts their greater wheels have wrought.

Galaxies fling their bristles wide, spattering flame on a canvas boundless,

artless, imponderable. Yet Here, garden and dome, a prodigy quests,

spinning in pitch and timelessness, forever falling

round a warm mother sun.

Our world is mindbogglingly beautiful:

in evening she murmurs, in morning she sings.

Each tremor of birthing, each strumming of wings,

mirrors the templates of season and tide:

leaf follows sun, wind scatters rain,

streams rush to bed, to the lullaby of sea.

O sun or grit or fluke or fate,

is my one sweet life

just one more torch in passing…

The heavens yawn above us, the clockwork shrinks below:

in molecules are…galaxies becoming! Larger, smaller, up and down:

all things bend to math and mind. Yet--

!!!IN INFINITY EVERYTHING ADDS UP TO NOTHING!!!

You see, chimeras breed in peepholes, where tiny wheels are wrought.

These wee wheels spin their smaller wheels; the smaller wheels, the jots.

The jots chum from the mocking depths

and vanish into nought.