The First Universe was You
(Maybe one day it will all make sense. This is probably just my hubris talking.)

You were the first person I saw
—visually—as a Universe

I had been feeling it for a while–
this idea of the infinite

In the love I watched women
Give to everything, everyone

Around them, the spiraling arms of
Stars– known, each in their own sphere

I heard it in my head, when you
Explained: I am trying to love myself

In essence, “I contain multitudes,” and I
Chalked that line up to some god from

Our shared past-religion, but it turns
Out it was Walt Whitman

Describing women, of course, he was
Describing himself and thereby all

Humans, alike in our vastness, and then
A friend’s husband died, and I felt

It all over again, this idea that we
Are these very fragile, very short-lived

Phenomena, and yet, somehow infinite,
And don’t forget that must explain

How your trip was my trip, or I took
A part of your trip as my own trip

Like a feather in my mushroom cap
Like a rose in my funerary lapel

Because I am enough was what your
Psyche told you, and I am here to

Infinite down on that memo, that factor:
I am enough. You are enough. Multitudes.

You contain multitudes which is why
Making decisions out of temporary

Information must feel so hard. So,
Take my hand. Grab my spiral arm

Arm in arm. Here we go. Forever
Into the Unknown. Universe.

Arms

To have the arms of the Universe flung out before
You. I’ve seen it with my own eyes—one arm rolling
Sushi with her son, another arm filled to the infinite with stars
Held comfortably under her daughter’s climbing shoes.
You are made of Everything—darkness and light– the stuff

Jeweled into the eternity of now, this moment.
Universe, can you hear her? Like listening to nuclear fusion
With a stethoscope—the breath, the pulse, the beat, the
Mother-heart giving life to all existent things, and even things
That may no longer be. But that act, the fusion at the

Core of the Universe—every opal clouded nebula, a nursery
Every blazing Azure star, a new creation, can you imagine if she
Knew she needed to become something new, and altogether
Different entirely. What if she knew that her core was burned
Out, her fuel exhausted and all of the stars, all of the

Beings that rested in her consciousness would once again
Become so much dust, so she died. She gave up her
Old form, her life, her arms spinning off into the horizon
She simply couldn’t go on fusing life together in that way
Explosion/Implosion it wouldn’t matter which way the

Translation took place, but the Matter of it all would always,
Always remain. The actual physical atoms of all she gave, all
She shaped, all she sacrificed, forever encoded in the stuff of
Galaxies, dwarf stars, and solar systems we’ll never lay eyes on
She knew it. Yet, she wept anyway, despite her knowing