The Law of Falling Bodies: Poems

The Law of Falling Bodies

The Law of Falling Bodies First the fires of the flesh, and then A little hammer breaking your harder parts, Hinge and marrow beaten down to a mealy sift, So much smaller than the dark resistant stoniness of stone. Two things I can’t live without: water and light. And make it three: that woman who lay beside me For more than forty years, blonde gone to gray gone to ash. In the days of forgetting, the nights last longer than before. The mind, with its strange affinities, goes back barefoot Into April, murderous month that suckles its infant kin: You dead at one end, and at the other a newborn, First child of our son, sweet Linnea in her cradle. Galileo leaned out from the leaning tower and let go. What more proof do I require that we all fall at the same speed? I’ve given up on blackmail and bribes, the layaway payments of prayer. All I have left is the ropy tenderness of an old man’s uncertain touch. • • • 96 ...