For the Lady of a Physicist

[Editor's Note: Many thanks to Michael Bishop for giving us permission to reprint his work for a limited time in conjunction with Greg Beatty's "Reading the Rhysling."]

Although Bekenstein's hypothesis that black holes have a finite entropy requires for its consistency that black holes should radiate thermally, at first it seems a complete miracle that the detailed quantum mechanical calculations of particle creation should give rise to emission with a thermal spectrum. The explanation is that the emitted particles tunnel out of the black hole from a region of which an external observer has no knowledge other than its mass, angular momentum and electric charge. This means that all combinations or configurations of emitted particles that have the same energy, angular momentum and electric charge are equally probable. Indeed, it is possible that the black hole could emit a television set or the works of Proust in 10 leather-bound volumes.

—Stephen Hawking

     If I with her could only join

In rapturous dance, loin to loin,

Deep space itself would soon discern

Galactic rhythm in our burn.

Our bodies stars, our debts all void,

Then would we waltz and, thus employed,

Inflate with megacosmic thrust

Through night and death and sifting dust.

Godlike lovers, we would hang

Beyond the cosmos whose Big Bang,

All the mad millennia past,

Was but a popgun to our slow blast.

And as we reeled with raw élan,

Pulsing plasma in vast pavane,

We would shame the Pleiades,

Relume the Magellanic Seas,

Deliver all our Milky Way,

Ionic flux too fierce to stay,

In supernova, and so rehearse

Our own expanding universe.

     But my small body is no star,

Albeit something similar:

A blind pool vacuuming into it

All the lambency it's not fit

To redirect and render rife.

The woman I would take to wife

Sees only blackness in my eyes,

Rapacious ebon, hungry skies,

An O-gape gravid with desire

To aggrandize itself in fire;

And so her light sweeps down the hole

That is the maelstrom of my soul.

     Therefore, I have become for her

A dark, entropic murderer,

Whose chiefest virtue is his pull.

Then, while my strength is at its full,

Let me draw her to my embrace,

Collapse her will and show my face.

With her my Beatrician guide,

We'd tunnel with the thermal tide

Into the arms of Betelgeuse—

With Quasar sets and Marcel Proust

Emergent with us, glory-bound,

Detritus of God's Lost & Found.

Thus, though we cannot create light

from love, yet we will vanquish night.