Gravitational Tug
What snakes out from the universe is real
It’s the road we rake, the path that nabs us
With its bloody thumb. The sun is our candle,
True, and that night sky all too dark even with
Those spangles and waves, with the hurtle of it
Whipping around us. “I had nothing to do but walk
Into nowhere,” O’Keeffe said. Some days it feels
Entirely whole to me, others it’s all just spilled
Powders mixed up, red troubles and abyss.
I feel the gravitational tug of each least thing,
An ant, a speck of breadcrumb, and I sense
How the trees move aside a fraction of a fraction
Of an inch, how they want to make me over,
Rearrange my atoms, scramble the flocks of me
Into seed or wind or leaf. Soon enough.
Walk to the Farmer’s Market
through the neighborhoods
through the old city
cemetery, where the pioneers nest
where the jailbirds working off
time dig, water, rake, swing
their weed-eaters back and forth
over, across, around the mounds.
Silk roses, white, in the arms
of a cherub—they look spotless, brand
new, though the grave is eighteen
hundreds. There’s the smell
of fresh mown grass, the scent
we’ll remember when we mingle later
in the fruit and vegetable stalls, under
the freeway overpass that hangs
above it all like a bridge
to the afterlife.
