There must be a finite limit to our love,
he said. But I could not draw it on a napkin,
doodled in the margins of crumbs and stains,
nor could he join the points of the graph,
which we’d once thought carefully plotted.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,
you must first invent the universe he had quoted,
standing astride the genesis of our cosmos,
our Big Bang: the yellow bedsheets, the atoms
of oxygen swirling through arteries and hearts.
Now he sees boundaries where had been promise:
A universe expands only so far before collapsing.
We are not scientists, mathematicians of love
who have committed the natural laws to memory;
we’re theorists who have yet to scratch
the correct formula across the paper towels
and x-axes of our lives,
the limits still unknown, untested, unproven.