James Owens shares the mystery of gravity, and memory, and paradise.

Now
By James Owens

1.
Summer twilights when the earth
twirled away from the monster sun,
we stretched on the lip
of a grassy hillside,
poised for one sweet moment
of daring any force to pull us down–
and pushed off, unleashing
the wild tumbler gravity
from its cage of balance,
a thumping rush
past the box elder and apple
saplings whirling twigs
over roots, the planet
reeling us to the foot of the lawn,
to stagger for our feet on the dew-wet mowing,
woozy with a confusion of axis.

Then we loved the bloodwind in our temples,
the tilting strangeness
of the world where we landed,
smell of the baked country
unfolding to the dew,
which fell, we were told, like grace.

2.
Only stop there, and memory is paradise.
That was before any of us knew gravity
would pull harder and harder still, tightening a body to the ground,
and before the attendant miseries and little infernos of betrayal.
It was before anyone died. The secret
of memory is this: what was no paradise
is paradise now, built
and rebuilt from the tilting circle of sky.

What I love now is the precarious hold
before that dizzying lunge focuses you at the center,
dim bushes and stars freshly set in heaven
all revolving on a point, vantage where I watched
and watch–half gut-sick with speed–
sweeps of time, great scything turns of space.