“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.