“What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small.”

—Robert Frost

Time had a beginning when even darkness
did not exist—when the universe was so small
that it fit on the sharp tip of a pin and was really nothing—
except for everything and all that now delights and appalls
(stars and dark matter, gentle caresses and men ungoverned
by right and wrong) — is this what is meant by “design”?

I am not superstitious but I see signs
everywhere: deer scat, fallen limbs, the dark
stains coffee leaves on my shirt. I am not governed
by the gods of rabbis and priests, but believe in the small
ones of dust mites and quarks and shadows—these appall
and thrill—like bits of ink, sprouting seeds—simple things.

Hydrogen, helium, black holes accreting gas, this thing
we call light from the beginning of time—who could design
the line from then to us myth-making machines, apple
eating, Eden leaving creatures who learn more from darkness
than a god would want us to, who feel large and small
at the same time, who suspect that we alone are love?

Ask my wife, she’ll find what you’ve lost—like that one glove
I tossed off picking through parts, looking for the thing
I needed to fix our pump. It was a spring, so small
I needed bare fingers to pick it from the bin. You should design,
she said, a tool to keep you from dying of lost things. Her dark
humor kept me alive when death visited and left its pall.

And yes, death has stopped by—in the way only it can, pale
and needy. The neighbor boy, my son’s best friend—governed
by doubts, possessor of guns—was overcome by a darkness
only he could see. And there was me, my beating heart, a thing
so clogged with rust and and crud. It gave me one clear sign—
that the cosmos is inside us all—infinitely large and small.

The night sky and its stars heal the wound of me feeling small.
Yet, the strip-mall’s lights casting their bile-spun pall
bury me. I’ll often stay inside even on clear nights, resigned
to let universe expand without me, to waste the awe I’ve been given.
In my room with books of poems, fingering my wedding ring, I think:
Before the florid light, there was all that could be made by darkness.

Inside us is something so small—all the goodness given
and all that will appall. This is the singularity—the one thing,
the universe, a sign—that the dark embraces all that shines.

It is time the stone made an effort to flower.
‍For too long it sat waiting to be thrown
through a window, to smash the library shelves,

to bring books to the fire, to crush the skulls
of non-believers who doubt the crown. It is time
the stone made an effort to flower—

to send roots down so deep it can’t be raised
by the mob to hurl at bones not ready
to be broken, bones of the bodies of those

who don’t bow to a god, those whose church
is their own or none. It is time
the stone made an effort to flower,

to bloom in all the shades, not just black
and gray, the stems to be placed
in the barrels of guns, to bleed

in hues tinged pink and rose,
some the color of pride, some glowing
like a flushed cheek sore from so much

smiling. It’s time to spread the news:
the king is dead; stones are for lining
garden beds, roots are to remind us

we were all once rock and now
we can be flowers.

First raise your head and loose a raucous howl.
Don't try to explain, don’t stare at the alpha.
Spread your arms like barred-owl wings and breathe
the musk. Recite Isaiah chapter forty-three:

“Forget the former things.” Forget the gods.
Grieve the creatures’ winter mange, the raw
abraded flesh, the festered wounds, the fleas.

And when they circle, snarl and bear their teeth,
and reveal their ulcered gums and stinking breath,
when you fear the big one going for your neck,
concede—like you would to a heart attack or a kiss

Don’t flee. Recall that fear provoked this myth—
that the land is yours. Don’t call friend Steve with his
lust for guns and predators’ blood. Sing hymns!