Beloved:
On May 20, 
1964, at just
below the summit
of Crawford Hill, in 
Monmouth, New Jersey, two
young radio astronomers, Arno Penzias 
and Robert Wilson, trying to detect the brightness 
of galaxies, found, as they pointed the Holmdel Horn Antenna,
a persistent hiss, a dull hum, no matter where they turned their radio telescope,
and in doing so, they stumbled on something near-numinous—a sigh from so long ago,
when space-time barely existed: the cosmic microwave background radiation of the early universe
as it kept expanding from its super-dense, opaque plasma beginning, cooling to the point where
protons and electrons became hydrogen and everything became transparent. And after the last
scattering surface, everything had finally cooled just enough to allow photons to speed across the
fledgling cosmos, streaming and racing toward us from the distant past, maybe 400,000 years after
the Big Bang, leaving us with this radiation of ancient murmur. And maybe, my beloved, as you’re
reading this, you know all this, because of course you read it in a newspaper article or a scientific
journal, which would be true to who you are and your awe over the immutable clockwork. It came
to mind now as I write this poem, because I can deeply sense that you’ll feel, when I am gone, like
one of those photons zooming through the expanse, adrift and not connected to anything at all. You
will be that way, sometimes, but you will also come to sparkle in your own corner of everything that
remains. And though you will be unable to easily detect my presence, I’ll be there, alongside you,
a dim but constant manifestation of what was and, to the best of our knowledge, always will be,
expanding out to the edge of what you will perceive as time. Despite unimaginable energies–a
primordial singularity–13.8 billion years have passed, and the universe’s long shadow has continued
on. Cataclysm cannot help but leave a mark on what was, but, my darling, that does not mean that
what was is lost forever. Listen for it, feel the shiver of it when you look up at the sky from our dear
cabin at night, or on some lonely road, and you will feel me radiating out, ever out, to the end
of everything, always there, a deeper dark. Can you feel
me there the
out among stars?  I’m if
there you
want to me and
seek out remember

    that everything keeps 

going.