Magnitude Aunt Lydia Does Stretching Exercises

A soft sweet cheese they make for daily bread,

and in the vat of milk and rennet set an egg,

to tell them when it’s done. While they’re

feeding the chickens or sowing corn, the whey

congeals in streaks and superstring curls.

Rifts develop, curdy lumps,

and gases congregate in spirals;

the smell grows desirably rank as elements

thicken into earths and metals,

and when our unhatched robin-blue planet

sinks, this batch will be ready.

Or maybe enough dark matter exists

for turning out firmer cheese,

a dark dark marbled Swiss with black holes

and delicious veins of stardust forming

from windborne impurities, along one of which

our Earth is a fleck of blue mold.

Maybe they wrap it in burlap, so

the rim of this universe bluntly prints

a coarse fabric weave on the next one.

Think of the milch cow they keep, its size,

the heat of its flanks, the weight of its hooves,

think of the one who comes to milk her,

whistling square roots, perhaps, or wave functions,

think of the breadth of space in the swinging pail.

And think how you’ve nonetheless fit the whole barn,

for a minute at least, in your head.