Over dinner I show my girls the picture of the black hole Messier 87, also known as Virgo A, also known as NGC 4486, most commonly abbreviated as M87, photographed by the coordinated efforts of more than 200 scientists all over the globe who pointed their telescopes simultaneously at precisely the same dark spot in space to capture the red-orange glow of plasma beaming toward us and the black crescent of its shadow, and I explain about galaxies glued together by gravity and the tremendous pull exerted to gather a billion lights into pinwheel arms, and I’m all worked up into a fever of science fervor as I whip out the wipe board to draw the Milky Way with its spiral dust trails, marking, at its heart, one large dark dot, which I’ve just learned is named Sagittarius A*, whose name, with that “sage” right up front, makes me think of wisdom and Chiron and chiaroscuro and the movie I watched last night with my girls piled up on the couch in a mound of pillows, and in the movie Princess Lily and forest child Jack battle the Lord of Darkness, good vs. evil, light vs. dark, and the hooved, bull-horned, red-skinned devil argues to the last that light isn’t light without darkness before he’s sucked into space, and I’m still a little miffed that I checked out the wrong version of the movie, not knowing the director had his own cut with a soundtrack that does not include the glorious 80s-ness of Tangerine Dreams, and I guess the band’s score does date the film, but hey, nothing is timeless—not me—I’ve dated myself with my movie reference—not my daughters, who I’ve tried to take back in time to relive my childhood, but of course they are living what must, by necessity, be a very different version with a wildly different soundtrack, and I try to explain how a black hole is so dense, so massive it swallows light and even bends space-time, and when I said nothing is timeless just now, I didn’t know yet that time comes to an abrupt stop at a black hole’s center, how time and gravity seem to switch places, time effecting the final suction no force can halt, and as our minds crash into the universe’s complexity our small star is slipping toward the horizon and casting gold over and through and around the ferns and Douglas firs in the backyard and the shadows are deepening and elongating making the gold green grass all the more luminous, all the more lush.
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Dayna Patterson is the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Her creative work has appeared recently in POETRY, AGNI, and Passages North, among others. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre and a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother in Mormon Poetry.