Dark Matter and Dark Energy
My husband says dark matter is a reality
not just some theory invented by adolescent computers
he can prove it exists and is everywhere
forming invisible haloes around everything
and somehow because of gravity
holding everything loosely together
the way a child wants to escape its parents
and doesn’t want to—what’s that—
we don’t know what it is but we know it is real
the way our mothers and fathers fondly
angrily followed fixed orbits around
each other like mice on a track
the way every human and every atom
rushes through space wrapped in its invisible
halo, this big shadow—that’s dark dark matter
sweetheart, while the galaxies
in the wealth of their ferocious protective bubbles
stare at each other
unable to cease
proudly
receding
Copyright © 2015 by Alicia Ostriker. Used with permission of the author.
“I am married to an astrophysicist who recently published a book on dark matter and dark energy, the manuscript of which I read more than once. The poem plays with the idea that we, like cosmic bodies, are surrounded by invisibly clinging haloes of strange particles, and are subject to forces we cannot understand that drive us apart.”
—Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1937, Alicia Ostriker has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2015 to 2020.