Experiments with gravity (bound to change)

Gravity

I.
Side by side in a sickly sweet kitchenette,
My grandpa smartly rolls his
shirt sleeve, revealing that
blue faded tattoo and smacking out
stories about
WWII and Southeast China.


A curious collection of porcelain dolls
wait in cupboard corners,
wide-eyed, high
and ready.

In a single, polished motion,
he correctly peels a granny smith.
It’s waxy, spiraled skin
settling between thin thighs.

II.
A school of soldiers strategically step,
spines straight,

negative spaces equal.

Regiment six-sixty-six
conquers and collapses
your local George Washington Bridge.

III.
Damn aeroelastic flutter—
always threatening my equilibrium.
So that I step sporadically on
gridded grates, a hundred holes,
perfect rings for my big toes.

Braided steel cables, joints knotted
cast gray-toned toothpick shadows
(gift my eyes quick breaks
from an unassailable sun).

At bridge center I bend to an arch,
tie my right boot, grab my last cig
(tucked safely
under thick laces).

The innate strike of a match
and the harbor below:
sulfur-salty and fresh.

Nicotine numbs the day’s travels.
Thoughts thicken and the mind wanders.


IV.
A gray hand belonging to
a gray man, grips my shoulder.
He fails in bumming a cigarette—
my pockets and belly empty
like his.

The man’s face:
a weathered and wrinkled map
of juxtaposed journeys and lost childhoods.

From a history book?

Pausing mid-bridge,
we exchange dwarf tales of
midlife crises and motion physics.

Before parting, he declares,
Change scares me,
relationships as well,
sex even more.

Heart plump and juicy,
falling through an orange sky.
Sailors delight?

The man whispered with wind,
Everything hits the ground eventually,
and he walks, in perfect beat, the other half of the bridge

V.
Journeys end and curiosities collapse
with the strangle of sudden death.
Grandpa’s dead, come home.

VI.
At Rosemary Cemetery,
Grand River and Woodward.

These bodies have been here
longer than us—
time and space imply change,
like the Pacific tides or a mountain
weathered to sand under pink toes.

Is change creation or destruction?
Both.

Beneath buzzes of busses,
The dead are whispering.
Their words warnings—
everything makes sense.
It’s too late to fix things.

VII.
We march on gravel paths,
a line of red ants,
down the great wall of the deceased,
deep into a rectangular grave.

I can’t see my shadow anymore.

My uncles assemble, one at each corner—four
stones, stern and unaffected.
They lower him gently,
with the same love as his mother,
my great grandmother,
when she first held him.

We come into this world
with no memory and leave
the same way—death and birth
painless miracles of God.


VII.
They cut the ropes,
an empty thud and the beat
of breaking hearts.

His journey ends here
with other lost souls.
Where am I supposed to go?
I waited for his whisper,
Everything hits the ground eventually.