t h e   l a w
o f   f a l l i n g   b o d i e s

b y   t h e o d o r e    b e s t


: iii


I see pride leak from my ruptured tank.

It turns black an ancient coast,
Home to the waltzing mass of newborn gists
Whose steps are metered through desire.

These concrete towers of thunderous lope
Pit this country of hearts
With a black gashing as lightless
As divined sand

So that I find a self falling
To that mother of devotion,
Exploding to the bosom of obscurity,
Hovering, qualmish, on the rose of a new confusion.

To break, then.
To beach with some alchemical that through
The tender of the bodily, construed by the
Glow of convoluted minds,
The dear red shift of ancient light
Would pulse as the beating of an eye.

Galileo was so bold,
Umbilical thrashing to
The coy vacuum without his mother’s womb;
Its gush seeding the marrow of
Its own composition for the
Adamantine Sophisters to beat.

Yet I cannot shake the prisms of this inflating brane.
I assume an occult tongue and speak of the
Infinite heat of birth and bangs, or the journeys
We must take to find ourselves where we are not.
Armstrong’s lunar step was not creation,
Nor progress of humility, but was
Another marvel simply waiting for its time,
Having already occurred.
That ground was not ours,
My mother did not carry its pitted craters
In her tubes, and-
I remember:
I am made of the dust of advent.