A BLOB OF GOO?
. . . instead of being like an empty room
(a really big room) space is more like
a huge blob of thick goo.
~ Jorge Cham & Daniel Whiteson
When I was just a child I knew
the universe was awfully full
of emptiness and nothing more
surrounding us—that was the lore
taught in those times, the teacher’s store—
but now they say that’s bull.
Astronomers have changed the facts.
It’s hard for me to understand
how space can be a blob of goo
when astronauts tell us they flew
up to the moon itself, and new
research says space expands.
It’s not like taffy, that I know.
Not sticky gunk or sludge or slime.
It’s not like goop. It doesn’t jell.
Invisible. It doesn’t smell.
So what it is, I just can’t tell.
I hope I’ll learn sometime.
What Einstein said was surely true—
he said that space can stretch and bend.
Space goo is something like the air
in which we walk without a care
and hardly notice anywhere—
without it life would end.
Wilda Morris’s third full-length book of poetry, At Goat Island and Other Poems is scheduled for publication by Kelsay Books this spring. She lives in Bolingbrook, Illinois, USA.
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