We were not meant to be here long. A month, maybe two, they said at first, when the fires burned and the colonies opened their doors wide for the final exodus from Earth. Then, three months, six. Then they stopped talking time at all, just directions and rules and reminders not to forget the laws of a civilized society.

Richard Feynman, in his Lectures on Physics , commenting on the poetic notion that the universe is in a glass of wine, exclaims thus:

I think now I was meant to be the clock / in the crocodile, to claim warm minutes / in the story�s gut, / in the boneless dark