Against Gravity

AGAINST GRAVITY

Blue sky, ungated clouds, & on a sand-pitted

highway sign the number 10 stands out--

a minor footnote in a monograph on drugs,

a reference instructing the reader to study

my nap on the floor of a Ford Econoline

summer after high school. As if rest, & only rest,

were what we found ourselves made of, sometimes.

Though rest is only one trait, actually, when

you've been hitching between Tucson & El Paso

and gotten picked up by a van. The equally ingenious

others look like tie-dye & restlessness, like

rest stops & silvered heather, maybe jimson,

and a little lantana raising its nippled red speckles

into the scent of sagebrush rained on & drying.

They got me high, three men & a woman costumed

estimably in the style of out-of-work jesters,

jovial people of 1971, wearing the standard issue--

fusty cloches, velveteen pants, embroidered emblems,

with shiny balls like cat bells dangling

off one or two ears. For one a self-etched tattoo,

its motto the equation ACID=BLISS framed

by a multiplying fungus or exploding chloroplast.

For another, a fu manchu & fedora. A synaptic Apache

snake cinching the woman's frayed macrame belt.

Mirror sunglasses for all. And small mirrors,

like tiny ponds, frozen pools, had been sewn

onto the woman's India print blouse by some

Kashmiri laborer, who, if he could have looked into

them, might have seen me dozing off, stoned

on pan hash, bits of myself reflecting back,

scattered, a tired grin from the woman's

right sleeve, the puffed wrist, pale ear at the tip

of a breast, nose on her stomach. And haven't I

always loved being broken up & abrogated by sleep?

But when I woke we had pulled off the road

into a ranch. From the tape deck "Brain Salad Surgery"

blared, a form of premature senility disguised

as endless synthesizer riffs. For a second, in the nazz

and compression of noise, still stoned, I thought

they intended to kill me. An intuition

so melodramatic & dumb the sight of two of the men

kissing in the front seat had to wipe it away.

 

I had never seen two men kiss, & the surprise,

which in another setting might have shocked,

even disgusted, my sheltered murmurous little self,

somehow reassured me. The kiss implying

not so much gentility as distraction.

Then, out of the eddies of shade, the woman

ran, having tossed off her incongruous imitation

alligator heels, naked now except for

purple tights, she ran & turned cartwheels

three times across the yard. Gravity.

Gravity. They had wanted to visit a friend

who, they claimed, was connected to anti-

gravity research being conducted there.

Merely a windbreak occupied by

an adobe shed and barn, it seemed abandoned,

as if during the night the hard rains,

the lightning, had chased away the enemy

of gravity, & now we were to take his place.

                                             -David Rivard, from Wise Poison (Graywolf, 1996).