It’s midnight, my morning, so I go for
a dose of reality. Down the stairwell
of moonlight and shadows.
The parking lot of serenading crickets.
Rows and rows of black squares.
Early classes or lab duty, I guess.
Tall tree trunks along both sides
of San Pasqual.
Two 18-wheel Vons trucks
half-fill the near-empty lot. I find
a cart, ferret out the biggest Fuji apple
and Hass avocado. Speed past snacks,
Asian, a dozing retriever in Kitchen,
where a tattoo model shelves spatulas
while a dirty blonde stamps soup cans.
I wonder if she has any interest
in cosmology. I wonder if it’s Tuesday
or Friday.
Supermarket wattage at 12:30 am
is a baby bang, as Georges Lemaître might
say. I take the dark way back to campus.
Once, Feynman, Gell-Mann, and Hawking
slept not far beyond behind these trunks.
A cop, his headlights off, makes me
feel watched over.
First, Copernicus showed
that Earth orbits the sun. Galileo found stars in
the Milky Way, and now we’re finding exoplanet
after exoplanet. Soon, we’ll identify habitable
ones in spades. Having parked, I walk back
to the crickets, still singing. Many E.T.s will look
like our bugs, others our worms, and so on.
(Some will have long feelers like cockroaches,
others not, like cicadas.)
The Fuji and Hass on the sofa
then up the stairwell to cosmic clumping.
It’s the diffusion of clumped matter and
energy that generates heat flow, currents—
joie de vivre. If the Big Bang hadn’t left clumps,
there’d be no galaxies, us, emotions. And no
TV dinner, which I forgot to buy. Dagnabbit!
inspired by Frank O’Hara
Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, RHINO, Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Plume Poetry, Slipstream, Scientific American, and Rattle, among others. A PhD in theoretical physics, Kenton writes from Northern California. “Pasadena, 1987” is based on his time as a theoretical physics graduate student.