Poetrie: Infinity

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The probing eye of Palomar peers skyward to reveal

A billion molten, fiery stars in our galactic wheel...

And shows that even this great disc

Is but a firefly burning,

Within a much more monstrous wheel,

Slowly, slowly turning.

May not this next celestial wheel

Be but an atom's glow in some big molecule of stars

In some huge flake of snow?

For may not space flow on and on from door to opening door,

Like seas that open into seas and never reach a shore?

If in our atom's tiny flame a billion stars are whirled

And millions of these lonely suns has each a captive world,

Just follow to the trillionth power and on beyond to see,

What must be true when ciphers link down to infinity.

Somewhere red planets swing around a triple silver sun,

And pale, pale rainbows interlock their arches one by one.

Somewhere, dark girls upon their brows grow curving, scarlet horns,

And ride in tinkling gardens on great golden unicorns.

Somewhere rains of diamonds fall on foaming, milk-white seas,

Where rockets follow streaming light from star to star with ease.

And soft-eyed girls with honeyed lips swim up to sing and free

Their water-weighted lashes from their native shining sea.

Great blue-white giant blazing suns control a thousand spheres

Where reptiles march in glistening ranks and fight with jeweled spears;

Where lizards lounge on ivory thrones

And keep to weave and spin, to clean their overlapping scales,

A smooth-skinned race of men.

Somewhere crustaceans think like Gods and muse eternal laws

And write the music of the spheres with clicking bony claws.

Or beetles, fish and furry things emerge as sentient breeds,

Or, working with atomic fires are thinking centipedes.

Or, coal-black spiders sway in webs

Beneath chill alien moons,

And finger gemlike instruments to strum immortal tunes.

Or serpent-men on serpent worlds evolve to racial prime,

And glide in fourth dimensions where

The riddle solved is time.

For if there is no end of worlds and nature keeps her laws,

Who knows which life will win which world:

The hands...the coils...the claws?

So feathered things and crawling things

And creeping things all go

Their separate ways on separate worlds,

Around, above, below.

If God employs infinity His wonders to perform,

And there's no end of endlessness,

Can there, then, be a norm?

Would God give souls to sentient beasts

Or would they still be clods?

If evolution is God's way,

Whose image, then, is God's?

An endlessness of worlds implies a world of every kind:

Worlds where our past repeats itself until the end of time.

Worlds where our future's far events enact themselves before;

Where every closing portal means another opening door.

So if there is infinity, if endlessness is true,

Somewhere, Napoleon walks again the fields of Waterloo;

And somewhere, always, in the depths of time's vast shoreless sea,

Upon the ghastly Hill of Skulls,

Christ hangs upon the tree.

--from some sci-fi mag; copied out long ago and forgotten till now.

UPDATE: The poem is by Rosser Reeves, and it appeared in "The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction, Tenth Series" in 1961. The cover price is/was 45¢!!

The editor's comment: "The author is chairman of the board of a large corporation, and we confess we find it intriguing and comforting to know that a man whose workday is devoted to the harsh realities of multi-million-dollar profit and loss has in him that good old-fashioned sense of wonder."

He was an advertising executive (creating among others: "M & Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand."). See comments below for link to more info.