For Nothing Sounds as Much Like the Lost World of the Womb as the Motors of Our Machines

         Even that bathroom fan, the one we talked of replacing
in those years before our daughters. But the first
                  came home in December, and that fan was all
that would soothe her, those weeks when we rocked

         and sang and paced, until our feet played our old
oak floors like the keys of a mistuned piano.
                  All of us sleep-dumb and lost in those hours
she’d cry inconsolable, screaming her red-faced squall

         through this house that was drafty and cold.
How she longed, I’m sure, for the womb,
                  its weightless warmth and racket the only
two things she knew. But that fan with its chirrs and whirs,

         its constant clicks and hums, must have sounded
somehow familiar, like the bloodstream’s tidal hum
                  or the murmured pitch and timbre of her mother’s
off-kilter heart. It’s a comfort we can never recall

         but I’m sure we all must long for.
And isn’t that what physics now says, that it all shakes
                  down to this? We’re mixed up dark matter
and star-dust, the breath and mud of the cosmos,

         so that’s where we’ll all return. Finally
soothed and calm in a womb where planets collide
                  and suns implode every day, as an embryonic
light just clatters and hammers along.