Alan Walowitz

Alan Walowitz (www.alanwalowitz.com) has been published various places on the web and off. He’s a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry, and teaches at Manhattanville College. His chapbook, Exactly Like Love, is in its second printing and is available from Osedax Press. His full-length book, The Story of the Milkman and other poems, was published in May by Truth Serum Press.

Photo of Another Black Hole

Observing the unobservable:
that’s what I do day-to-day,
but without the aid of all those fellow-watchers
flung far as Antarctica, where
so many endless nights
close in on you like a black hole.
All you need is the telescope
you coveted as a kid,
and plenty of time on your hands
to be joyously sucked in.

Mostly I do my work from home
where it’s good enough to lie around
and read the sports and horoscope,
given all the fake news we’ve got to endure–
like this by way of the Times:
Astronomer Avery Broderick, from the U of Waterloo, says,
We know there must be something more
when he knows damn well there’s nothing.

Not even light escapes.
Yet, these dark circles beneath my eyes
seem more remarkable
and cause real worry closer to home–
too much matter jammed into one space.
I see it walking down 8th toward Penn,
those cardboard boxes lined up on the grates
and perched against the cold.

What a time to be alive,
says Physicist Janna Levin, of Barnard,
a pretty good school to learn the unlearnable
and not even a light-year from here.

Still, I stare at the photo she helped take,
and swear when I look deep, I can almost find
the reading glasses I misplaced last year,
not to mention the time I’m always trying to make
speed past like Einstein’s train
bound for God knows where.