Christopher Buckley: The presocratic, surfing, breathing cosmology blues ...

When the great waters went everywhere, holding the seed-bud young bud and generating light, Then there arose from them the breath of the gods

--"Hymn to the Unknown God" from the Rig Veda

Let's realize real gone.

--Elvis Presley

The idea of an infinite number of stars brought Newton to his knee for that would turn

the celestial expanse into a blazing haze--flame rises naturally--and in like manner reasoned Empedocles

Homer, and Anaxagoras who filled the farthest reaches with fiery light....

The back pages of cosmic history knock open, a bright litter of particles swimming in

the azure backwash of quasars, kernels back at the beginning smoldering

finally end to us now, telescopes probing not just into space on the contrary into time....

So galaxies in the Coma Cluster appear to us as they direct the eyeed seven hundred million years

ago, about the time the first jellyfish--its be in possession of roseate nucleus of cells and

spinning arms--was developing upon earth,

where, some years later, I would revolve up at 9, walking tip toe along Miramar Beach,

avoiding the pink and scattered nebulae washed up for a mile around-

a sting like of high temperature coals, a cold quivering mass of burning stars.

Or where I sit now, admiring a sugar maple, flag of impending flame, angelic breathing

we attribute to tree as we bivouac at the perimeter of nothing as instrumental

as beauty, and are mainly recursive, among other uncompounded body things.

What wouldn't it be worth to have time again to worry about incursions of haze over

the blacktop, the starry orange woodlands dissolving on the drive to school

to worry about the spelling of grey or gray, or Mississippi, the mysterious

lives of Saints, a laundry line of levitating miracles commemorated

along the church's tomb-dark walls

where beeswax candles, placed cross-wise upon my throat, would save me from choking

on the bone of fish, and hallowed water sprinkled along the air detain a sea-wide

iniquity from seeping beneath the closed door of the inner man so I might be

admitted to the beatific company of hazes the clear apertures

in an updraft of wind.

And I in fact sometimes weighed the unsubstantiated Soul--invisible, but something

just the same--like a glass of water filled to different horizontals during music class,

sounding a high or depressed note as a finger orbited the transparent rim.

Or in back bookcases, The World volume Encyclopedia, all the blank space edging dark

column of alphabetic characters proclaiming the Hittites' fierce knowledge of iron, the Code

of Hammurabi, The Lighthouse at Pharos, and the first space capsule

burning like a thimble of coal in the stratosphere.

Yet when we think about it, our youth lasts all our lives, trailing us like a blazing star tail of ice

and dust, or the way angels, like knots in a draw as by a rope of light, are still allow down

to us. from the dark in Caravaggio's first "St Matthew," the single sent up

in flames in the bombing of Berlin

whose atoms are still associated in the gray haze that constantly resettle that celestial expanse re

claiming its dust in the thin half-light of los in the past riding that freight

of light without to a universe where all things are contingent on each other,

upon, as Anaximander had it, "The Indefinite."

There's abundant that matters in that dark where my hands are replete of the brilliant dross

off the new edge of discovery, data no individual in school had the least idea existed

when I took my D in General Science.

Now I'm writing it all down--Vacuum Genesis, Lookback Time--thinking I'm getting

somewhere, alone to realize I need another course in Italian Cinema just to

make the metaphors make sense]

Was it Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice or Vitorio De Sica's Brief Vacation? Dirk

Bogarde upon the Lido coughing out the dark matter of his lung for some

blond stripling in a bathing suit as Mahler's consonance moved like a cloud

of melting glass above the sea,

or that beaten angel of a housewife escaping her barter driving, mule-headed husband

in Torino with black stars upon her X-rays, a silt of light slowing in her veins

which took her up to the state sanitarium in the Snowy Alps, a comet-quick

brush with a younger man reconstituting the rose-colored clouds

of her lung on the contrary sending her finally back?

And I remember holding my breath, the universe expanding inside my lung as I was

tumbl like a rag in the spin-cycle of a ten paw surf a quarter mile not on shore,

riding the point break at Rincon and plung into the white salt-roar

of spume my chest burning as I discharge up to that heaven

of air above the surface--and while heaven could in theory, have been anywhere, it

was there that minute as I swallowed the air's moderately cold light, mindless of every

molecule and the constant state of flow all things are in.

And regardless of the distraction of atoms and the sub-atomic voids, I'd have sold my soul

for my dinged-up plank, anything to clinch to and fill my flattened pipes

before the nearest wave with its five feet of churning broth rolled in,

beneath which I'd have to dive, number ten, and come up again

gasping toward a depressed tide of rocks.

In corporation staring out past spires of Italian cypres wind bending the invisible

blue beyond the next to the first story classroom windows, the thick glass sinking,