... nothing has ever happened in this or that or any other, or maybe too damn many,

parallel universes? Say--depending on your take or pull on string theory, that is––

or just how many glasses of merlot we’ve had with our steak and baked potato dinner. So, what then, eh? We all fall into a theological-philosophical black hole? Or would that be fall somehow into a whole, if not to pun too much on homonyms? Even if the red meat doesn’t kill us, not to mention the gobs of butter, sour cream, too much salt and A1 sauce (whatever’s in that!). And you’re not even eating your nutrient-rich fiber-healthy baked potato skin are you? Although the steamed broccoli’s certainly looking good for you.

 

Swallowing a fork full of steamed broccoli, she says, wry as a raw carrot, well, it’s all gonna be ok, see, because God, she, invented steak and potatoes and steamed broccoli way back in the original non-GMO organic garden of Eden. Butter and sour cream, of course, being just a variation on cow, more or less. Yes, some more merlot, please.

 

Well yes, I say, quite comforted, sipping my own refilled merlot as well: if Edenic cosmology’s anything like an Escher painting. Or, at least like falling into an astro-cosmic trompe-l’oeil: into The Eye of God or the Cat’s Eye Nebula––those twinkling teleological mysteries winking at each other 650 impossible light-years out toward Aquarius.

 

Ok, yes, she concedes, but higher moral things are not just emotions or metaphors. She now waxes passionate: they’re the very bark on life’s tree, to use a more earth-bound analogy. Maybe even with a mild homonym pun on the bark of life, she wryly adds. Besides, as you can plainly see, I’m now eating my nutrient-rich fiber-healthy baked potato skin. It’s true enough all such answers are enough to make you cry or laugh yourself to death, she says with a lushness in her eyes. And what’s really going on between you and me, huh? Love/lust, maybe need? Go figure, for us representing cosmic what? Infinity’s surge, maybe? So, now I’ve eaten all my steamed broccoli and my baked potato skin, let’s go for an after-dinner walk under your Eye of God and Cat’s Eye Nebula allusion—or would that be illusion?

 

Later strolling along the beach under whatever cosmic stars are twinkling we’re holding hands: startling up sleeping gulls, soft milk-white breakers shifting the sand washing away our footprints behind us. We’re listening too at the silences, all of our senses made sovereign. We the trembling shore. Clarity that enveloping shiny fog rolling off near-midnight’s lapping ocean. Anyone for heading back to my place and a midnight slosh of merlot, I ask, knowing she’ll say yes. I’m seeing the Eye of God wink, hear the Cat’s Eye Nebula purring.