Dane Cervine

 

 

Tiny Bubbles

 

    Tiny bubbles, in the wine, make me feel happy,

      make me feel fine.

                                         -- vintage pop song 

 

Physicists, ever leaning into mystery,

say we are not made of atoms after all,

but of something much smaller:

sparkling tiny bubbles, mini-universes

birthing and collapsing like champagne.

 

That every point in this spacetime foam --

including the vast emptiness between

an atom in my nose, one in my thumb,

and the thought of a rose in the enfolded

gray matter of my brain -- is packed

with hidden energy.

 

That the center of any particular miniverse

has no intrinsic direction,

no arrow of time -- that each moment,

each universe, each little self

is a bubble, emergent, whole,

an almost incalculable now.

 

Some even say that every point in spacetime

cycles through its own expansion and contraction

like tiny versions of a cosmos.

Each moment, a microcyclic universe

endlessly moving from singularity to Big Bang,

collapse, repeat -- driven

 

at the center of it all by uncertainty,

the most quizzical principle of all.

So here’s a toast,

 

to this effervescent moment --

momentous, unfathomable,

bursting from moist lips

into power-packed thin air.

 

 

 

Sven Birkerts

Adachioma Ezeano

Ferris Jabr

David Toomey