World Coffee Table Tome Day

I don't often buy such hefty tomes (this one is actually difficult to lift), especially when such images are available on cheap DVDs, which take up a fraction of the space. But I'm a sucker for inner or outer space (the micro and the mega) and sometimes I yield to the temptation. Also, it was reduced; these kinds of books hit the bargain basement almost immediately. The contents are sumptuous, images of galaxies to be pored over, grainy walls of stars dense as granite, nebulae, super novas, gorgeous bouquets of gigantic, unimaginable violence.

And here's a poem I am working on, an attempt to take in stuff like this by praising the guys who do the calculations: astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, etc.:

Credo

Their hands are there in the cubits, in the caulk
pitching the ark, or they summon the dry
incense of chalk.

And someone has almost cracked the door to the vault
in the big bang, unravelled the fault-line
in String. I genuflect

to frolicking laws that unlock the loneliness
in atoms, dangle the rope ladder
of dimensions, other wheres;

laws that are wiser and wilder than any poem,
that can waltz on pinhead dance-floors,
beget downpours

of numbers, unfinished nightscapes hoisted like wet
sails, restless hands with star-grit
under their nails.