God hides first.
We cover our eyes and count to infinity
God keeps on the move
Or maybe sits still, smug in a snowflake
Or just in plain sight in the plenitude of things
Or down in the tiny wriggling strings
Where things get fuzzy.
It's a little discouraging
She can second-guess our deep imaginings
So why not climb inside our heads
Tuck Himself inside our skulls ?
If She can hold a clutch of planets in His palm
Why not a galaxy of selves
Within the confines of our brains ?
The rules forbid a singularity
But make us glow outside
While we are left paradoxed and flummoxed -
Is a black hole the absence of God
Or the place She is most vibrant ?
Tricky.
Were we created to play with God ?
Scuttling little creatures in a labyrinth so vast
Infinity seems a comfort
A way of dealing with the impossible
Where the game is over before it's begun
And begun after its over
Where time is of the essence
And space a matter of choice
That opens and opens and opens
In cunning dimensions that are all here
And present and correct
But out of reach forever.
The biggest difference between us and God
Is that we want to be found
And we don't know whether God does
One moment He is The One I AM
The next She is all the grains if sand on all the
beaches and all the deserts of the Earth
Or just one grain in the Gobi desert on a hot afternoon
Or just one atom of the grain
Or just a dancing particle fizzing
In the nucleus of that atom, the uncuttable
That turns out another level of complexity
Whirligigging down and round and round and round
So we cover our faces and count
As we did yesterday and have done tomorrow
The game is over before it's begun
And begun after it's over
And it comes to us we've been here before
And thought the same whirligig,
Round and round and round
And we're lost in the Where
Where the When was bad enough
This side of the Big Bang which had no point of origin
Or maybe is the whole point
In one of the dimensions we can never put our fingers on
Even the stuff we thought was all there was is baffling -
There are too many galaxies
That go too far back
The dance is too slow
How can we wait for Andromeda
To arrive and mingle her stars, her glittering hem
To liven up our solitary quadrille
When we'll be dead and long long gone?
But the game's more loaded still
God can hide in dust, gas, dark matter
In what is really just debris and suspicion
Even hide in pure energy
Names for the shadows in our brains
Cast by the fevers of our light
So God hides and seeks us simultaneously
Flouting the rules
Deep inside our thought
Jumps the levels of energy
The orbits that aren't orbits of anything
The dance of energy and matter
In the moment they fuse
Confuse the mind
At the end of thought
God is all about the big stuff
And all that therein is
God is in the detail
God is in the design
God is the design
And all that therein is
The wound up clock
The pieces of the clock to be assembled
By minds tied to the speed of light
You'd really hope were fast enough
And here I am, a grain of sand
In God's image
On a beach somewhere
Or maybe the beach now far from the ocean
Stranded from the sea in a blink of geology
A grain perched high on a mountain
Kidnapped by the wind
Hey ho said God
Fancy meeting you
It would have been fairer if it was just the Earth
Just this little ball of tricks
Said God
The Earth amuses me
So much fuss and mayhem
The whales know me
Said God
They know me best
And take their time
To listen, and sing.
You apes, you barely listen
Oh sometimes the odd individual
Will spend a few days in the desert, on the mountain
In the cave, a few seconds in the agony of death
And hear something
But you're mostly too distracted
You have so little persistence
God treads on space like a trampoline
Runs by the little peeps of life
The empty halls of death
Is His own echo
Her own reflection
In The Beginning God said Let There Be Light
On the shores of chaos
Sitting by the waters
Was truly busy
When the six day sprint looked possible.
Then things got opaque and slowed the timetable
And the next big moment
It was really Time
For God to call out Let My Photons Go !
A shout louder than Moses
As loud as the Ylem
All over again
In its frenzy of self-expression
Since then it has never stopped
The watched pot always bubbling
Particles like popcorn
Popping in and out of being
In what we poor fools thought was empty space.
So where do we hide?
Isn't it time to crawl into Her lap
Or find we've been there all of Time
But haven't had the wit to see it?
Is the universe the lap of God ?
Or is it all in the lap of the gods ?
So how many laps does God make round the park ?
Is God still playing or given up and gone home ?
We'd better stop counting and look.
