Orange County NC Website
Browse       Search
DocuSign Envelope ID: DED368CC-D87F-4704-8F64-B8F2DB10EE93 <br /> "I am Stephen Hawking and I want to know how our universe works," unpublished <br /> (part of manuscript in draft Through Water with Ease) <br /> I am Stephe Hawking and I want to know how our universe works <br /> is what he said over dinner,his synthesizer a voiced map <br /> of letters flashing.What could I possibly want <br /> as much as Stephen wants? It's true I have never cared <br /> What happens to objects that fall into black holes, <br /> but Stephen wants me to think about how all objects change <br /> once they slip over the horizon of a coll,,psing star,. <br /> are never really gone. <br /> I'd like to throw more useful objects <br /> into black holes, like socks that lost their match,an ex-husband <br /> perhaps, and the driver of a truck who led dozens of migrants <br /> to the dark cavern of a trailer and barreled from Syria to Austria <br /> to abandon them, That driver set those people <br /> over a kind of black hole event horizon, turning them <br /> from whole sets of information <br /> into nothing but soulless bodies. <br /> Where is he now,that driver? is he a solid set of atoms? <br /> Carbon,hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium—oxygen? <br /> Can these elements together make a man whole? <br /> And what about the scientist at the end of the table, <br /> the one who offered another explanation. <br /> He held a sheet of paper <br /> with its hand-written words,, <br /> and said we could burn this page, its poem. <br /> becoming photons rearranging in a smoke— <br /> not lost but lifting, to an indecipherable <br /> golden height in a starry night above. <br /> K. B.Yoiing 6 <br />