The day a tornado inhales Alabama
then spits it back, I’m sitting
with my son at Math Day, listening
to lectures about how to find
a black hole and how tsunamis find
us. It’s simple physics the professor notes: the fishing
boat hardly notices the small wave lifting
it upward a few feet, only miles from the shore that’s shortly
overwhelmed. & earth? speck of nothing passing with ease
through larger-than-galactic clouds of cosmic gas
hurled from enormity-collapsed- on-itself. But what
I still want to know: How does
the wave gage its distance from the ocean’s
floor? How does the singularity know the weight of its orbit?