Dark Matter and Dark Energy by Alicia Ostriker

March 13, 2015   Dark Matter and Dark Energy   Alicia Ostriker

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. About This Poem   “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 is the author of The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014).  She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches in the Drew University low-residency MFA program in poetry and poetry in translation in New Jersey. Photo credit: J. P. Ostriker Most Recent Book by Ostriker   The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) "Dangerous Astronomy" by Sherman Alexie "The Sciences Sing a Lullabye" by Albert Goldbarth "Catastrophe Theory II" by Mary Jo Bang Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006,Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.