At Christmas little children sing and merry bells jingle,
The cold winter air makes our hands and faces tingle
And happy families go to church and cheerily they mingle
And the whole business is unbelievably dreadful, if you're single.
-- Wendy Cope
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
-- Frank O'Hara
White Dwarf
One day when our sun runs out of fuel and collapses inward under its own weight, then picks up enough mass from its neighbor to explode outward, the blown debris approaching a good fraction of the speed of light, then, then you'll be sorry. Oh, relax: we have five billion years, give or take a few million, to prepare. Meanwhile we go on believing the universe has our best interests at heart. The dock down at Groton Long Point throws a lovely wood skeleton fifty yards out into the Sound. There we rest, after a bike ride, and the winds rise by our witness and the waves build, and the paper-white sails and hulls of pleasure boats cut scimitars into the bay. We sit close-pressed and watch without speaking, wanting to live here, in this model galaxy of islands and peninsulas and rock borders where earth, water and air meet in the small fires of our blood. Oh, why not. We watch a long time. I whisper to you. It is the middle of the day but your hair has that scrubbed protein smell once locked in the center of a star. Why not here? This is what I whisper. Even as we speak, close galaxies are speeding away, faster than more distant galaxies, which are also receding. Groton Long Point, Milky Way, heat of your body next to mine: this is where we live, now. Lovely little islands of matter, surrounded by the blank of space. And the dark taking over more real estate even as we speak. Encroaching zero of the infinite, white dwarf, my breath on your neck: even as we speak.
