Gravity & Levity

Bin Ramke

Where assassins sleep a wash

of dream breaks against bars

hours of every day are night

a furious freedom a breath

a humid flight return to

serious childhoods—what else is

dream—enactment and revenge

the released terrors swirl

every rapist in sleep renews

his first fond wish to kiss and kill

and is a secret self. Does she make

music from that body? I see she

is bruised she played herself hard

or someone did. She has bled

she has a bandaged body; she is lovely

Does she love me as I slip the dollars in?

The slot above the window

where the faint sound wisps?

No one is sadder. She is bruised

(who is not?) she loved

the world didn’t know better

she lived there. A voice

settles, a sheet spun

out over the bed settles

under air, in, through, air, weight

the weight of voice settles

on, into the bed. You are lying

unclothed, perhaps cold

waiting to be wanted

it will talk you into something like

being warm at night. Or the air,

on the air, the breath a kindness floats

the breath is air it floats in air, air

of your air—take and breathe

this is my breath—it takes the shape

of what it settles on, who listens.

Who speaks too soon too often.

The great democracy of flesh—

all are guilty. All sleep.

In German, a language,

the art of heaviness is called schwerkraft,

          gravity

O heavy the little body hers:

But from the sleeper falls,                  Doch aus dem Schlafenden fallt,

as though from a still cloud,              wie aus lagernder Wolke

the opulent rain of the grave,”           reichlicher Regen der Schwere.

Make sense of the world, do not resist

the ready term. Well, welcome the rising

and falling, I was a happy boy who placed

the coins in the ready slots. Eyes. I watched

the dance I felt the rising. The eyes

closed a little O, a heaviness of the lids,

like little caskets closed.

O and again O.

In 1612 John Donne wrote in response

to the blush of a lady, “her body thinks”—

(of Elizabeth Drury, “The Second Anniversary”)

A trick how curves of space have

their way with the body the boiling

of the particles defying; delirious

damage accruing

live in landscape a place

where it rains clouds rise

to make home (long for days

of decorum and starlight)

the body thinks and the body’s

thought inscribes itself            abrasion

welt    weal    lesion    scar

bruise    freckle    pimple

postule    pride    boil      wart and mole and

malignancy    abscess    wound, O.

*

5. In all things there is a portion of everything except mind; and there are things in which there is mind too.

17. The Greeks do not rightly use the terms

“coming into being” and “perishing.”

For nothing comes into being nor yet

does anything perish, but there is mixture

and separation of things that are.

So they would do right in calling

the coming into being “mixture,”

and the perishing “separation.”

18. For how could hair come from what is not hair?

Or flesh from what is not flesh?

—Anaxagoras

*

The heron resolves itself from the gray lake the water

conversely the woman dissolves in sex, her own

in liquefaction but the flesh reforms like wings

unfolded flight like light drips glistens

the setting sun the horizon first

above now below the bird the evening only local

the spinning earth flings its fluid surface

dissolving itself into itself its ecstasy

the need we feel each for each, the falseness

of any world, at all it is a kind of patience

impossible to distinguish from lassitude

it is a kind of hope indistinguishable

from stupidity. I know (of) a man who killed

himself and the woman he was about to marry

killed herself a month later. He wrote a note:

Until yesterday I had no definite plan to kill myself.

I do not understand it myself, but it is not

because of a particular event, nor of an explicit matter.

Every elliptic curve defined over the rational field

is a factor of the Jacobian of a modular function field

was another note he wrote. (I have his picture

on my desk, a gray parallelogram,

a thin man in black jacket black

tie bifurcating a horizon behind him

the line just above his ears this point

of view this lonely life there is only

a kind of barrenness in the background and a sky

which is a world, of course, plenty.)

This is a bigger world than it was once

it expands an explosion it can’t help it it has

nothing to do with us with whether we know or

not whether our theories can be proved

whether or not a mathematician

knew a better class of circles

(he has a name, Taniyama, a Conjecture)

than was ever known before before—

not circles, elliptic curves. Not doughnuts.

Not anything that is nearly, only is, such

a world is hard to imagine, harder to live in,

harder still to leave. A little like love, Dear.