只有今天早晨--丹.戈博

在几百万亿年里--
一个实际的数字
虽然我们起初不能领会它--我们
宇宙最后的轨迹
甚至都不会成为一种回忆
没有对它感到哀伤的记忆。

最后的星星的最后的星尘
将不会漂浮在巨大的虚无里
我们爱来自这里的一切
或者最终出于其中的想象。

然而每一天，每四个小时
夜以继日地，黛比
为这只成了孤儿的小牝马
准备混合羊奶
她吸干所有其中的三升，
似乎，非常感激
似乎它比宇宙中任何事情
都重要--
并且它的确很重要--此刻
当太阳离升起还有
四个小时
关乎的只是今天的事情。
In a hundred trillion years—
an actual number
though we can’t begin
to grasp it—the last traces
of our universe will be not
even a memory
with no memory to lament it.

The last dust of the last star
will not drift in the great nothing
out of which everything we love
or imagine eventually comes.

Yet every day, every four hours
around the clock, Debbie prepares
her goat’s-milk mix
for the orphaned filly
who sucks down all three liters of it,
gratefully, it seems,
as if it matters more
than anything in the universe—
and it does—at this moment
while the sun is still
four hours from rising
on the only day that matters.
“Only This Morning” by Dan Gerber from Particles. © Copper Canyon Press, 2017