for that fi rst companion
of your mere existence (before
you established relations even
with yourself, or your human mother)
the immense brood-beast
the natural universe, where
for instance Homer's `dark earth
and starry sky and strong-running ocean'
are a corpuscle eddying --
with a consciousness like the house
built joist and stud and rafter
in time, in human lengths, not
to pause even at the nestling
of chemical to chemical,
but entering those subtle barrens
where billionths of seconds go,
under the whole show
(leptosome to the last!),
into the sheer and clear
orderliness of chance
where the numbers do their dance
of no location -- haunt,
if what I've read is so,
of Heisenberg, and Planck,
and the quiet magister, Gauss