The sands are shifting as you walk; walk on,
The new is an emptier darkness than the old.
—Empson
Empson was wrong in his second line:
The new darkness is in itself a universe
Of dark energy, dark matter, and dark time,
In which the desperate stars rehearse
A first act of heat and warmth and life,
Where sapients stumble, bad to worse.
(In mushroom shrouds a monkey wields a knife,
Hurling at some fellow apes a curse.)
What it all signifies is more than we can know,
Which doesn’t mean that we're not free to guess.
Perhaps dark time itself might have it so!
If dark matter flattered, would dark energy confess?
Epigraph: William Empson, “Letter II,” in Poems (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935).
Note: “Dark energy and dark matter constitute 95% of the total mass–energy content [of the universe].”—https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter.