"Time and Space" by Heidi Seaborn

Time and Space
— a zuihitsu

NASA released a photo of early cosmos, red arcing galaxies from the edge of time.

I doom scroll a scholar’s thesis on multiverses, singularity, inflationary theory,
bubble universes—whether time is finite or infinite.

The time philosopher Craig Callender suggests that when we gaze at the stars
it’s not the past we see.

I once knew the Big Bang Nobel physicist. He gifted me autographed t-shirts
of the theorem. My children wore them to sleep beneath a ceiling of stars.

We lived in a rented house perched above the Pacific in Santa Cruz. It felt like the edge of the universe when my ex and I fought. Time yawned and rolled over.

  Maybe Emmanuel Kant was right—that space and time are creatures
of our imagination.

Sometimes when I see a woman in her twenties, I imagine she’s me—starry eyed—and think of the line from Diane Seuss, in my restless search for beauty & relief. I’ve been in the high-heeled race to the gate, felt the palpitation of trains beneath my feet.

Aren’t we all one breath away from terminal? I once saw a diver dead on a beach.
When he struggled in a noose of kelp, did he feel the sun’s heat broiling the Pacific, see it slicing the surface?

In cosmology, the premise that information cannot travel faster than light creates
a horizon problem.

It’s 9:15 pm. The horizon a broad brush of greys. Hush of cars in the rain.

As a child, I thought rain was God’s tears. Now I imagine a sorrowful God, even
as my faith frayed its hem, lost its stitching long ago.

My friend Catherine’s mother has lost all sense of time, lives joyously moment to moment like the latest cosmology theories where the universe oscillates
through linked sausages of time.

Imagine being freed from the need to think
about tomorrow?

heidi seaborn

Heidi Seaborn is author of Marilyn: Essays & Poems, [PANK] Poetry Prize winner An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, the acclaimed debut Give a Girl Chaos and Comstock Chapbook Award-winning Bite Marks. Recent work in Blackbird, Beloit, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, diode, Financial Times of London, The Missouri Review, Penn Review, Radar, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds an MFA from NYU.  heidiseabornpoet.com

Headshot: Roseanne Olson

Photo Credit: Kaylee Wallace