They noticed that everything
Was orbiting the rest of everything too fast.
Space should have been flying off into space,
They said, like children made of stars
Being flung from a fast–twirling
Galactic merry–go–round.

But the children were staying on.
The only explanation: something weird.

Like an impossible substance,
A dark matter that outweighs reality, ten to one,
Holding the universe together.
Also, spinning the universe apart.
Look for it, it cannot be seen.
Listen to it, it cannot be heard.
Try to grasp it, it cannot be held.
Darkness within darkness,
With a name that cannot be named.
Yes, that had to be it.

But while they could infer
The mass of darkness against the light,
They did not believe it filled the rest of the rest,
Until the long-standing search for lumpiness
In the cosmic background radiation paid off.

Suddenly.

They thought it was an error.
They ran the test again.
And when the proof held firm,
The testers issued forth a press report that read:

O, it is intangible and elusive, and yet within is image.
O, it is elusive and intangible, and yet within is form.
O, it is dim and dark, and yet within is essence.
This essence is very real, and therein lies faith.
From the very beginning until now
Its name has never been forgotten.
Thus we perceive the creation.

How did they know the ways of creation?

Because of this:
The surface of a sphere has a positive curvature.
No matter how far you go in one direction,
You will never get to an edge.
And a saddle that extends
Forever is considered edgeless too,
But, take note, negatively curved.
And any triangle one might draw
Has angles that total less than a sphere's,
But which are greater than the angles
Of a saddle that never stops.

The universe is, therefore, flat.

And no matter how far a soul might travel,
That soul will move no closer
To the margin of this forever–sized sheet of paper
Than the soul was at the journey's start.

From a speck far smaller than a proton,
The universe came to be the size of a grapefruit,
When it was only part of a second old.
A part so small they had to write it
As a decimal point with 35 zeros after it, and then a 1.
That's not very much.
That's called turbo–expansion.
It came from silence, it came from void.
Born of its opposite, time from no time,
Space from no space, existence from no existence,
Everything from nothing.

Which means, they say, that the stuff
We can see when we gaze up on a clear night
Will slip away, star child by star child,
So that in tens of billions of years, it will all be gone.
But by then the sun will have shrunk to a white dwarf,
Giving little light and even less heat to whatever is left of Earth,
Though it will take a hundred trillion years for it to finish dying.
That's a thousand times longer than the time that has passed
Since the proton turbo–expanded into a grapefruit.

The same will happen to the other stars,
(athough a few will end their lives as blazing supernovas)
Then all that will be left will be their burnt–out cinders
And the dead husks of planets.
And in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years
The black holes will collapse into blacker holes
That will disintegrate into stray particles, which will form atoms.
But not the tiny ones like those we split.
These atoms will be larger than the universe is right now.

They will decay. Eventually.

Even these will be returned.
Everything to nothing, time to no time, space to no space.
Once again, simplicity, once again, formless substance.
And without form there is no desire.
Without desire there is tranquility.
And in this way, all things will be at peace.

Until everything re–happens. They say it might.