Maybe Gravity, and: On the Commute
Rent from DeepDyve- Maybe Gravity, and: On the Commute
Maybe Gravity
is a metaphor for desire:two bodies' attraction to one another,her body's attraction to the apple, dropping itbeside a hollow ball of twine and watchingthe way bodies of different weight
will even in air and landat the same time, and somethingin me is falling now, knowing thisdescent is cumulative and has already beenparceled into an equation elegantas the blossom that mothers the fruit.
There will always be more to see! I thought once,staring into a grapefruit;Everything missing becomes something new.Now I clop one open into two sunny bowls, [End Page 144] saw my knife along the rim, tip it in and intothe knot in the middle, wedge a pink parcel onto my spoon
as juice and lashes of pulp flood the gap,splash me almost in the eye—Yoo-hoo, why so far away? my mother calledfrom the counter, years beforeI understood the measureof her attention, her vigilance
dividing fruit from rind.I haven't done half as good a joband now I shovel up mangled bits,grab the last wet packets with my fingers,the scraped rind like a bone socket,the center's bright pulp like labia.
But when isn't fruit a woman's body?Once, when I was young and she was lithe,years before the hot drop of menopause,my mother held an apple in her elegant hand,and in one uninterrupted turning,stripped it of its sprung red ribbon.
We set it on the radiator to dry,added a tiny kerchief and cloves for eyes,and it was amazing, how soon,how human its wrinkled face,as if the doll were nothing we had madebut what had been there waiting. [End Page 145]
On the Commute
It's the old story of incremental lossthe street performer sings,how you can't always get what you want,but if you try sometimes,you'll get what you need,even you, in your brown bootsscuffing glass to flash like rivers,listening inward to the old storyof the sun—how it wantedto be one of many, like any of us,so it fingered every spear of grassand iron filing, shot each poppyinto fire crinoline and thenin this multiplicity, achedto be indivisible, invisible,so it clapped one weary palmon all weary brows,undertaking the long nonnegotiabledevouring back to carbon.Oh, the see-saw of all along,the rocking rememberingof how we came up with Godand God came up with usin the same shocked shudder—shadow wrinkling the watersand dropping—like syrup from a spoon—onto you. [End Page 146]
Rachel Webster edits universeofpoetry.org, the online anthology of international poetry. She earned her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College and received a Young Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have recently been published in Poetry, the Southern Review, the Madison Review, and Blackbird. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, with her partner, Richard, and their baby daughter.
