Dark Matter

^{“dark matter is like the space between people”
from Tracy K. Smith, ‘Life on Mars’, Graywolf Press, 2011}

My friend Stephanie died last February. She moved to France several years ago, although we phoned and wrote to each other often. We first met when I was out walking my little terrier (who died eighteen years ago) and her two mastiffs, Tess and Rosie, pushed their huge heads through her gate to sniff him. At first, they were terrifying, with rumbling barks and slobbering chops. Steph came out to say hello, explained that they were big softies in her gentle Derbyshire accent, and invited me to come in for a cup of tea. She had just moved to the village.

Steph was the funniest, sweetest, most down-to-earth woman I have ever met, and we were drawn to each other immediately, a strong pull that I knew would never break. Steph believed in angels and I believed in dark matter, opposites attracting.

On sunny afternoons we would sit in her garden, chatting about anything and everything, singing and giggling. In winter we would watch films and read. I miss that closeness, the way we could sit and read different books in silence and still be communicating.

sunny afternoons
blossoms giggle on the breeze
voices of angels

Kim M. Russell, 2^nd March 2026

Today is Haibun Monday at the dVerse Poets Pub, and Frank is our host with a ‘Life on Mars’ tribute prompt, an allusion to Tracy K. Smith’s poetry collection the Pulitzer-prize winner’s classic 2011 book of poems. It is an extended elegy for her late father, Floyd William Smith (1935-2008) who was “one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope,” according to the New York Times’ Dana Jennings.

Frank has shared excerpts from two poems in the collection. In the first, Smith addresses her late father; she yearns for his presence again, realizing that the last avenue for this is through her own life: through being herself, his daughter. In the second, she evokes the sense and strength of the mysterious force binding us all together in orbit around themselves, even beyond the strength of love itself.