With the Boy, in the Dark

The boy is interested in black holes
because he doesn’t know how to say
death death death. Just, infinite dark.
Event horizon. Singularity. The boy
teaches me how to mouth the absence
I won’t imagine—the dark keeps going
without time so it can’t hold words.
One of us will enter it. And then another.
But the boy makes an exception: rats
can escape anything, are a synonym for
what I call meaning, what you might call light.