In "The Kingfisher," Mary Oliver had written: "I think this is / the prettiest world—so long as you don't mind / a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life / that doesn't have its splash of happiness?" Well yes and—dying, there's the rub.
The Kingfisher, so Rousseau tells us, does not think of these things: "When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water / remains water." This, of course, only & always a possibility in a world of speculation—we have no way of knowing—but neither do we, after all, know what happens after death. Nor whether laws formulated twenty centuries After Prophecy (a primitive time, we'd agree), and in a provincial backwater of the grand Universe, will hold up across the spaceage pages. So the Heat Death of the Universe, the iron-cold leaden-echoed conclusion which comes naturally out of questionable premises is itself mere possibility, in a world of speculation, that has correlated with the whims of nature for just a geologic instant.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. That is yet to come. The year is 2010. The album is Have One On Me.