for Dick, on his fourth “rebirth-a-versary”

The universe keeps dying and being reborn,
physicists say. It doesn’t stay the same;
it’s ever expanding, as Einstein theorized—
exponential expansion, which means
that as much as we want things to remain
the same, a rock solid cosmological
constant, they just aren’t.

In the universe of your heart,
the seemingly dead was jumpstarted
back to life. Weighted with such
inexplicable mass, I had to sit
and breathe for a bit, as did you,
recovering.

Now, four years later, I remind
myself that we are continually reborn,
the cosmos within each of us
exponentially expanding at times,
contracting at others.
Our meager concept of time
turns out to be a mere eyeblink—

proving again that love is the true
cosmological constant, like atoms
ping-ponging across the cosmos,
traveling through space to lodge
squarely in our fragile, starstruck
hearts.