Gravity

We walk secure, grounded, heavy, oblivious,
safe from perplexing weightlessness,
unlike Life Savers candies on Atlantis spinning theatrically
as glittering Las Vegas floats beneath,
or those rusty spherical droplets
of Tang, humorlessly drifting over the Indian Ocean;
we are safe even as Kubrick's treacherous computer,
tenderly releases the cradled voyager to drift reeling away,
receding, smaller and smaller, no longer a man,
a fading star, and then just gone,
unclaimed even by the false gravity
of his mother-ship.

Yes, we are safe because she holds us tightly, binds
us with unseen, loving coils, lest we range to adventures
too high, too dangerous,
too unnatural;
the bungee jumper, skydiver, snowboarder, eventually all learn
her love is costly,
and even tired, timid professors shudder
when top floor classrooms into basement labs fall;

then, with violent, jerking movement,
her jealous love pulls us, prize seed all,
into the deep, cool soil of newly furrowed cities,
Chendgu, Port-au-Prince, Santiago, Christchurch,
San Francisco,

and Gravity, jealous lover, finally claims us as her own when
in the recesses of our graves we wait,
germinal, for the static earth again
ardently to quake.