For the Oort Cloud Won’t Know Your Name

“Like a modern Copernicus, Jan Oort showed that our position in nature’s grand scheme was not so special.” ––  Seth Shostak, astronomer

O, you’ll orbit her with kisses, alright.
Orbital love being so grand a thing
to show her.
She is your center, she is your star.

Yes, you’ll turn her gently in your arms
to plant each breathy kiss,
you’ll lay them plump upon her inflam’d lips,
and, into the depthless shell of one delicate ear,
and, upon staticky short hairs
at the back of her sweet-smelling neck,
and, now again turning her
you’ll kiss the other honyed ear.
Perigee to apogee, how sweet infinity.

Or, at times she’ll be motionless for you
and you’ll demonstrate Kepler’s ellipses:
pace round and round her hips, to
peck so gently so lightly those lips
to press passion to eyelids, to
slip your tongue, soft and hot, into
the delicate canal of a lovely ear,
then the back of the head,
musky now, but just as sweet
as the neck was before,
re-turn to nuzzle again the other ear,
still a shell lovely upon a shore of wiry hair,
a dark, fragrant beacon.

Then, at such times as that,
she’s the start of Kepler’s plumb line
from she-to-you, then you-to-she,
she’s love’s bliss, inertia, cosmology;
the variable velocity of ardor
proven by math and observation–
she is perigee,
and your desire, the apogee.

Yes, Kepler’s laws abide.
K = R3/T2 claims infinite your devotion.
The mean radius of this orbit,
Where she is centered.
You, believing Einstein’s hopeful constant,
that λ = endlessness, endless-ness, end, less all ness.
You, and Einstein, both of you claim
that the pressure to remain,
and the pressure to remain in motion
will always be in balance.

O, you simply refuse to know
How some passing force
will tear you from her.

Alas, you and she will be pulled
into random vectors, and love itself
will tend toward disorder and decay,
and you’ll both be liberated
by the energy of the vacuum–
zero-point or Dirac’s broken symmetry,
sickness or death, debit or catastrophe,
cancer or despair.
Don’t think it,
deny this truth,
how love’s constancy can’t remain
Even if you want it so with all your heart.
It was so from the start—
as mass is mass, the graceful physics of love
must always decay into mere calculus.

For, the Oort Cloud waits to receive you.
Infinity plus love equals infinity alone;
your heart is not special,
your heart is just a stone,
quantum nothing, nor entangled after all.
Dark matter, momentum,
or gravitational wave,
all of which might someday
sling you far away,
whirl you into stellar cold
the greatest end of apogee,
fling you out to all that infinity promises.
Not love, you see, not mere love,
but only naked expanse awaits you,
nor shall re-pair your beloved and you,
shall care not a planck about you.

Love is not love that gravity’s dominion defines,
nor that wants long lifetime where it only vacuum finds.

Rayfield A. Waller. Detroit, Michigan, United States. Waller is a poet, cultural critic, labor activist, and political journalist who is a professor of literature, history, and the social sciences at Wayne State University and Wayne County Community College in the postindustrial city of Detroit, Michigan.