Title: The Universe

Author: C.K. Stead

In: Sport 21: Spring 1998

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, October 1998, Wellington

Part of: Sport

Keywords: Verse Literature

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Sport 21: Spring 1998

C.K. Stead — The Universe

page 157

C.K. Stead

The Universe

i COGITO ERGO SUM
He moves
not like winged Mercury
nor Venus rising from the sea
but on wheels.

He speaks
not with the tongues
of men and of angels
or a zephyr among poplars
but with the voice of a robot.

He thinks
not as you and I think
interrupted by lusts and compassion
but like a computer.

Ordinary mortals
oil his wheels
feed him
and replace the batteries
in his voice-box.

‘There may be a God,’ he quacks
imagining a brain like his own
but as large as a planet.

page 158

ii POETICS
Wild as
water on a hotplate
a summer ant
flicked off its trail
an antigen
confronted by T-cells
here is a single atom
aurum
dropped on glass.

Things fly apart
that want to be together,
things are forced together
that want to be apart.

‘Conductivity’? Yes.
‘Lymphocytes’? For sure!

But where are the words for
the pain and the panic
the escape and the joy
the I and the thou?

page 159

iii LOST IN SPACE
‘How will I find it?’
asked Gabriel
sent Earthward
to bespeak a Virgin.

God told him, ‘Go past
the Park of Cubes.
Just short of Chaos
find the Region of
the Self-Igniting
Spheres-in-Flight.

'Ignore the fires
and the blinding light.

‘Find the Blue One.
Strike there.’