A Poem and a Prize

In 2006 I enrolled in a poetry class as part of graduate studies in English.  One night, while seeking some inspiration for my weekly poem, I noticed my brother's textbook on cosmology sitting on my bookshelf.  I typed the title: "The Foundations of Modern Cosmology" onto the top of the page.  What followed was a poem about two siblings.  One was an astrophysicist.  The other was not.  The essence of the poem was the disconnect in communication between the siblings as to the state of their mother who was failing in a nursing home.  The metaphor of the poem--or the irony I suppose--was that the astrophysicist brother had won some kind of prize relating to black holes.  How do we know the existence of a black hole?  By the impact it makes on things around it.  And yet, so the poem suggests, the scientist seems as oblivious to his mother's plight as the non-scientist is to the prize winning discovery.

The reason I am bringing this up today is that my astrophysicist brother has won a prize.  (read about it here).  When I wrote the poem I was concerned that maybe it would be thought of as autobiographical in some way.  This would be unfair to my brother, who is a sensitive and attentive son to his mother.  So I put in a reference to a prize.  At the time my brother had been recognized in a variety of ways, but he had never won a prize such as the one implied in the poem.  Now he has.

.... so here is the poem, six years later, now more autobiographical than before.

(I suppose the part about my not understanding the science of what my brother does is pretty autobiographical.)


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Black Hole

I wanted to talk about mother,

how she can’t see anymore, of nurses

who bruise her arms and legs

when they bathe her.  You fold your paper

butter rye toast while you read

Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman.

I read your horoscope out loud.

You’re talking about quasars, pulsars

or some goddamn thing while I remember

the zoo when we were small, how we walked

for hours in heat while I squinted

through thick lenses to see tiny animals,

pictures on wooden signs,

Look, there it is you would say

I would search logs, long grass

but nothing moved.

Even now I cannot see.

I told you mom was proud of your prize,

your discovery, black holes

how light, gravity swallows

I asked how we could know about something

we can’t see, without looking up

you answer by observing its effect on things around it

I told you mom was forgetting our names

but you do not hear

at home with your numbers

geometric shapes which prove to you

the universe continues to expand

until one day it collapses in on itself.