Portside

WHATEVER IT IS, IT COMES IN WAVES

By Maggie Clark

Now if I think of the earth’s origins, I get vertigo. When I think of its death, I fall.

                                                                                  —C.D. Wright (1949-2016)

Photon flights, superimposed, are sure to give us gravity.

So they say. As if we don’t have it already. Consider

the woman at the bus stop in slush-grey mid-January

who worries a worn-out, filled-to-bursting backpack

as she talks to herself and peers down the street, shouting

only at strangers who try to point out the sign that reads

STOP CLOSED—because it matters. Yes, even the little

displacements. Even the interferometer, gravity-catcher

extraordinaire, with its two arms four kilometers long, remembers

the crash of nearby surf, the rumble of passing trains,

the tectonic bruxism of the earth. Exclusion is the realm only

of scientists whose hearts beat just like our own—

too loud and too soft, too long and too short. Whose TVs stay on

all day in their offices, volume low, the news ticker

ten-times-hourly proclaiming yet another departure: a singer,

an actor, who knows. Whose inboxes and cellphones

deliver the more intimate others: a writer, a teacher, an ex-friend.

Grains of sand in a mounting heap, shifting and sliding

beyond language, beyond discourse, and yet each grief still

its own treatise on weight, peer-reviewed and exploring

how one life—and who among us ever anticipates which?—

will explode in its passing like some distant light source

570 billion times brighter than our sun. 20 times brighter

than all the galaxy’s stars put together. A superluminous

supernova 2.8 billion years in the making. Can you even? I do

by setting out candles for the dead—one for each of us,

that is, so far into the future. And the past. Life on Earth

a mere matter of cell membranes still mastering the old

sun-and-oxygen trick when that magnestar began spinning

fast enough, clean enough, to send out such bursts.

(If it even was a magnestar. If it still is one, after all this time.)

But we’re watching, and that’s something, isn’t it?

Waiting. Wondering. When the next wave arrives, will it be like

the improbable bus that shows up anyway, signage

be damned, to carry us home through the gloom and the damp?

The long, open arms of our instruments—patient,

indiscriminate—can record this gravity well of lost stars, big

and small alike, just fine on their own. We’re only here

to add heft. Just a little. I mean, someone has to fall in every time,

don’t they, for science, for humanity, and wave back?