David M. Brunson

Gravity Well

  to Li Po

On the Virginia tidewater,
a reflected well of moon

that once pulled you
into its drowning depths—

slow ripple, lunar shiver.
This year the first photo

of a black hole's event horizon—
the inescapable bright.

We've mapped atoms to quarks,
the universe to time's edge:

what remains unmeasured,
whole? What rogue star-

turned-ship mist-ploughs
across the night’s bay,

bow lamp blinking unseen
into the swallowing distances?

Tonight, the moon
signals from the water—

our slow pull towards all
that doomed and dooming light.

David M. Brunson's poems and translations have appeared in or are forthcoming from Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, Booth, On the Seawall, DIAGRAM, The Bitter Oleander, Nashville Review, Asymptote, Copper Nickel, Washington Square Review, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. He is the editor and translator of A Scar Where Goodbyes Are Written: An Anthology of Venezuelan Poets in Chile, forthcoming from LSU Press.