The Naked Singularity

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I.

When a star collapses, spent
of its fuel so much that it reverses
pulse – refracting back
all that once beamed — inversion
mounts to a threshold beyond
which everything dances
behind darkest veils,
canceling our ability to conceive
much less believe.

Black holes are of such
infinite collapse of spacetime
that we call their realm
singularity — Black because
there’s nothing to see it by
(no light escapes), singular
because no physics we have mounted
can name what’s profoundest there.

Around these black holes
quavers a halo called the
event horizon, boundary
of that bourne beyond which
no emitting light escapes
or trespassing things return,
dark spaces beyond the
last land masses on maps
where there be dragons.

We can only detect black holes
by nature of their horizons.
Weirdness rules the interface
where time dances like a Sufi,
wilting old blossoms
to warp new ones ahead
and yet behind them them
with a deranging jazz.

Horizon’s veil is thin
and the spectra wild – galactic
whorls of gas spiraling
mothlike round the darkest
hottest flame of all, slowly
revolving into the axis,
tendrils like dancing
Eurydice disappearing forever
once they cross over.

And what’s strangest is
that on the black hole
side of the horizon
time speeds back the other way
so disappearing precedes
birth, Big Bang theory
reading like fire, ready, aim.
What is history when
it races in reverse?

A bound charm, perhaps,
the world all wackadoodle
in the turvy world
of what of a witch’s
curse could once upend.

II.

Back in my history are events
that act like black holes
because their matters are so
dark I’ve never quite managed
to find a proper name for them
and I doubt I ever will.

When I was five
hitchhiking to school
(I didn’t like to ride the bus)
a man let me in his car
and when I got out
everything had turned to
wilderness, my mind on fire
from a holocaust below.

I’ve never been able to retrieve
what happened on that ride,
not in recall or dream,
not in all my reading,
not in psychotherapies
of talk or hypnosis or EMDR
though everything that
followed points back
to sexual abuse,
an initiation years
before its proper time,
tearing wide my
life’s collapsing wound.

He smiled when I get in
and all went dark;
then I got out and walked
into my elementary school
and first grade class.
Soon after I was in the
woods at recess playing
Show Me Yours I’ll Show You Mine
with the girls, my eyes
wide as an owl’s ferally
drawn to what was found in drawers
and under them that
desire to see, to know what’s dark
dominated my every waking thought.

In dream it was black pond in
the center of a forest where
I rescued a girl who fell in;
in play I drew a house-Chauvet
filling rooms with crossed zeroes
representing the vaginas I’d seen.

The man smiled as he
let me out of his car
and that was that; but
I was never quite the same
as if whatever had transpired
in that car had rearranged
the folds of my brain
or passed a huge black
hand across my eyes.

Who knows. The ride
was an event horizon
where everything I was before
crossed through a
man’s strange hands
– the touch of the Divine—
so that when I got out of the car
I was something else,
a seraph with his dark halo.

All I might have otherwise
been collapsed that day
in the car with that man
and what emerged
was a singularity,
compulsing my life’s
long warp and weave

into a repeated compulsion
for that singular convulsion.
All the drinking and skirt-lifing
I repeated for years
was in the name of
that old-school Evernight;

blackout drinking
and darkest encactments
inside the barely visible
naked depth of an Other;
seizures too, whirling
down in panicked vertigo
till all tightened to fist
that squeezed brain black;
suicidal deep-freezes
with their preciptal abysses;
even these migraines
occluding thought with pain.

Even this poetry owes its thrall
and pall to that singularity
that rules my thought in darkness
like Saturn from deep space
in a torn fold in my brain.

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III.

Yet I’ve come to know
and love the darkness of
that singularity,
even call it holy:
I’ve come to think
event horizons are ripe
markers of the Maker’s hand,

observable through my
every false move to
control it through obverses
and reversals, refractions
and half-sooths,
changeling dereliction,
addled augments of the truth,
delight in badness and error
and the horrors of the night
my singular mad delight.

Stinky thinking they call it in AA
but still phenomena,
the pregnant shadow of the hole;
and in the way that
everything gets turned
upside down and backwards
on either side of the
event horizon, my
worst became my best,
my lips on whiskey bottles
kissing the angel
that would save me
beyond the surrender
I could not abide,
ferrying me toward
an early grave.

It’s why, I believe,
most alkies die drunk,
dancing with the boneman
down the dark road of souls
into the cemetery proper
with the sign over the entrance
that reads “You Don’t Understand,
My Problem is Different.”

The tribe has that singular
inexorable law
that dooms them to think
there’s god in them thar drinks
that erase every boundary
self like falling in love,
sinking below the event horizon
into the darkness of oblivion
til the dark is entire.

IV.

Indeed. What the physicists
are straining now to ken
is that where no rules rule,
alternatives can co-exist:
inside the black hole
the brightest may yet exist
that can only be understood
in ways too dark for thought.

The evidence I have for this
is that I hit the bottom of
my life’s black hole and, where
I surely should have died
I surrendered the whole bum faith:
I changed my mind. At my
worst end I cried out
and some power inside that dark
reached in and turned the
twisted bone around.

Inside the crumbled carbon ball
of my collapsed life
an opening was found, the
door to a whole new universe,
a life now in reverse from
the rule of the black hole.
The Big Bang is that tale, I think,
ultimate cosmic compression
reaching an infinite declension,
dense even beyond death,
enough to portal rebirth,
a whole new universe
whose singular aura is my pyre,
my dark articulating fire.

I mean, once you accept
the nakedness of your
singularity, then the dark
isn’t so much feared as
unfurled, knowable
in the way all dark knowledge is.

A figure holding
a black candle
in a locked room
in the back of the brain
ushering us toward
some deeper, darker room –
a grave perhaps,
or madness
or a chapel.

Only the shadow
we must love or else
knows for sure.

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V.

Death I think is
the ripest singularity
of all, salt bourne
from which no mortal
sailor returns,
the ever-living sidhe
where a thousand years
passes in a second,
womb where I begin and end
tiding against all living shores
with its one sursurrant sigh.

Perhaps the dead
live on in Hades’
black hole just as
Homer sang, repeating
all the motions of the
living because they
don’t know they’re dead,
invisible to us yet
with faces pressed
against the darkened
window, calling us in
moonlight, breezes, surf.

When I write these
lines I’m close,
quavering in a liminal
where dead and living
thrive and thirst
and yearn and grieve,
all things possible
hence real,
memory and fantasy
and history and mystery
so fused there’s no
telling them apart.

Thus the dance is truly all,
cosmos whirling in
my cat’s eyes as
she stares back up
to me so dreamily
as I pet her
calling my brother’s name,
this night so singular
and dark in fog
the figure walking
down the street
in shroud is you
is me is the man in
the car and my brother
and the Lord of Hell

and the Angel of black holes
in the halo around the
streetlight this morning
so vast it glows on my hands
as I touch infinity’s
ripe salt door with
this’s poem baptismal plunge,
entering the darkest rooms
beyond the reach of art
at the deep end of the heart

where all the worlds are singing
in naked blue clarity
the psalm of the abyssal pall
of naked singularity:

“The way you think it is
is not the way it is at all!”

January-February 2012

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Notes:

• If you haven’t heard the tale yet, those final words were spoken by this blog’s patron saint Oran after his head was exhumed after three nights in the dirt of the Iona Abbey footers in 563 AD. Extrapolations of the myth here .
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• A less obtuse and far more poetic take on celestial psyche can be found in Amy Jo Sprague’s “A Trauma Theory,” a magnificent poem that appeared at the D’Verse Poets Pub on Tuesday and after reading it spurred me to get this damn thing finished off and posted.