Poem: ‘In Reality’ | Scientific American

According to astronomers
the universe is 14 billion years old,
a fact that makes the long scroll
of my life—

his fine brushstrokes of autumn leaves, tilting
above a mountain pool; the quick,
inscrutable characters who say
something wise and eternal but look
to me like long-legged insects—

so infinitely short
that in reality, one cannot say that I
to have lived at all;

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not to mention this day,
starting as usual with a coffee and a look
to the shocking headlines, with their promise
of a disastrous year ahead, which

cosmologically speaking,
is less than a mole on the cheek of the smallest
skating of unnamed particles in an oxygen atom
expired in a single breath of Time;

let alone the time I sat
thinking about this strangeness, while the earth—
another chubby teenager in quantum terms—
turned a little on its axis

so that the sunlight,
who left just 8 minutes ago
on his singular mission at the kitchen table
could brighten up the rolled skin of an orange,

my companion in nothingness,
it was waiting here
on the saucer next to me
from the beginning.

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