Beginning the Rock at Abbot School

It’s the sixties and it’s okay because the rock hits my foreheadlike my grandmother’s hand: blunt love. What it was was the laying down of law and never was it messy although

the law was laid because of messes I’d made. Say it was Saturday and I was shaking the booty as if that was the reason I was born; her hand fixed my future that I had no business shaking, upsetting

the transistors, killing receptors; we had to hear static all night. I could shatter papier-mache-wrapped light bulbs to provide access to maracas so that it was a festive rut I faced no matter which direction I turned.

In my last fever the numbers rose and rose until they hit this hand; they went smack and they went whap. Hey, hey, now; in my hand I’ve got the vertebra that held her up when pride failed, then she fell,

leaning to reach something, beyond my seeing her again. But here she is, ever Grandma, placing the link leaned towards in my hand, closing my fingers around nugget as if it could fly away: this heaviness, this weight,

this presence, this memory. It might be a piece of Galileo’s brain, anatomical synopsis. I think we are born with a piece of that brain, piece of that dreaming, piece of that wondering. I think that we each

submit to gravity again and again.