23 November 2022
Bernadette Mayer 1945-2022
Crosses for darkness, parallels for light. What trees are around you, which ones are living, can you move, hold your eyes open, do battle, bend down. This ground is the real ground, ground that circles & stratas to core, it boils, the only ground, crawling, nothing between you. Hanging & crashing. A flame. You are destroyed in the fire, you are black ash, you are stone, charred, fertile, a bed for hundreds of years of black work emerging. Your soul rejuvenates the soil, blood-red flower, an element of the mix, aces your grave. Now I am present, I'm there. When you see my face, white & design, you are fixed to it, repulsed, but its effort to love. We mix. Young & live forever, my blackness seeks the moment of your death, without accumulation. The legs of the flower, bending, screens in rest. Hide us.
If a massive star collapsed to a sufficiently small volume, light could not escape from it. A rotating black hole could account for the radiation of gravitational waves from the center of the galaxy. A black hole is a region of space into which a star or a collection of stars or other bodies, has fallen & from which no light, matter or signal of any kind can escape.
All night. Poisoning. Extracting the drugs of the flower. You are lost. I choose loss. Waves & shores, oceans of loss, separate, meeting, destroy. No one can get there.
I get you shot & go to the cave mouth. I wont go in.
What is the fate of the original body that collapsed to produce the black hole? Assuming that exact spherical symmetry is maintained right down to the center, the answer provided by the general theory of relativity is a dramatic one. According to the general theory, the curvature of space-time increases without limit as the center is approached. Not only is the substance of the original body squeezed to infinite density at the center of the black hole—that is, effectively, crushed out of existence—but also the vacuum of space-time outside the body becomes infinitely curved. The effect of this infinite curvature on a hapless observer, were he crazy enough to follow the body inward, would be catastrophic. He would feel tidal forces across his body that would mount rapidly & would reach infinity within a finite period of his experienced time.
from Studying Hunger, 1975
