"Black Hole Eats a Star the Size of Our Sun ..." —Jennifer Bullis
—Huffington Post, December 1, 2015
This fall, I observed through the near-earth telescope of my eyes
as a male white-spotted, red-brown spider
tested the periphery of a female spider’s web while she,
centered, same species but larger than he by ten,
pretended not to notice his presence or
her own irresistible pull. He advanced,
he retreated, his movements sending tremors
through the web, until, convinced she would not
reject him, he approached the center
and abruptly was embraced and dragged
toward the event horizon of her mouth,
his plume of legs fanning the air—
then she spat him, paralyzed, out
and containered him in silk to sip from later.
Spun by the violence, I looked away.
A physicist hypothesizes: the gravity of a disk
of dark matter, through which our solar system orbits
every 230 million years, may have yanked a comet
out of its regular path and sent it hurtling toward earth
and our doomed dinosaurs.
My mind’s eye returns to the spiders,
to the male’s oscillations of the web
and his unwitting fall inward
because of an invisible power, his tethering,
like all of ours, to regions of unbeing and being.
