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


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

About 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 Drew University's low-residency M.F.A. programs in poetry and poetry in translation in New Jersey.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2015 Alicia Ostriker. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate