The Black Hole

            inside the water, blue advancing
                        bluer into brighter blue—
although my unbelieving brother held his hands
                        over his face. And you,

Professor Pagels, would you not have seen,
                        reflected in my eyes,
the unresisted pull into the perfect heart
            of orange light, the last surprise

of pure acceptance that can never pass
                        beyond itself? I guess
            the gas ran back into the engine,
                        for we leveled out, and, yes,

terror returned the instant we touched down,
                        and my taut body knew
that I was safe there in my brother's arms.
            Next morning my whole chest was bruised

where I had clutched myself, and one week later,
                        back in the old river town
by the abandoned mill, we learned my pilot's plane
            had crashed in the dense mountain

flying home. "Don't know how Joel lasted
            long's he did," his neighbor said.
We sat, a covenant of brothers by the fire,
                        And yet the orange-red,

the green-blue flames distracted me; I watched
            the sizzling rainbow trout that night,
its smeared red stripe surrounded by black dots—
            collapsed suns lost in their trapped light.

—Robert Pack, 1989

Excerpted from Fathering the Map: New and Selected Later Poems (University of Chicago Press, 1993). Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

Home page image: "Wegbereiter Ikarus," print, woodblock on paper, by Wilhelm Geissler, 1966. (Courtesy NASM)