There are many kinds of deserts,
but they all reject the notion that life
should flourish. That’s gravity.
A grim background disturbing the atmosphere.
But it can’t make you fall in love, or at least that’s
what Einstein said. With an exquisite fussiness,
it intones mystical equations
and leaks blood in -alabaster basins.
Gravity is a creature of two nights; it feels a certain kind
of anxiety in the litany, so it shakes the earth from the flesh,
as if the beast itself might sabotage the magic trick.
Like jumbled chunks of sea ice, always creating dead ends,
it is becalmed in an ocean of sand, or bread slathered with honey.
That’s gravity.
An oracle of falsehood always driven by the illumination
of alternative futures. It soaks in the nectar-laden flowers
waking to the touch, a fragile fiberglass skin. Ordinary like our sun.
George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Moria Poetry Journal, Chronogram Journal, Ampersand Literary Review, the Angle at St. John Fisher College, and 3:16 Journal. George’s blogs, essays and letters have appeared in the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Havana Times, the South China Morning Post, the Buffalo News, and more.