Three pounds, fifteen and a half inches long

.................

About the weight of a head of cabbage. Or half a gallon of milk, I'm told. I can believe the fifteen inches - the simultaneous undulations across the belly span its width. The head of a cabbage is on target in relation to volume, but the weight? The vortex at my navel is a tiny black hole, infinitely more massive than the 3 pounds suggest. Pregnancy affirms what cosmologists have been telling us for years now: visible matter is just about four percent of the stuff of reality. The other 70 percent is dark energy, with 25 percent dark matter thrown in. Dark - not just invisible, but ineffable, outside all known categories of existence. Transcendent.