undocumented gravities

One physicist told me: picture a bowling ball in the fabric,
the fabric caving in—why bodies fall toward one another,

spinning. How spacetime curves. My grandmother spoke of weight
in other ways: the hush between names in an unread ledger of losses.

I finger that line, the jagged edge of scab, the raw grain Ellison heard
scraping every blues. What do I do with this mass of memory

now bending every moment into its warp? She lost her mother
to fog-lung at nine, crossed alone to a house with chandeliers,

quiet corrections. Her eyes went dark when I asked about the war.
She kissed me once, called me her lost sister’s name,

then whispered into the rosary beads drawn from pocket to lips.
A song she didn’t teach me hums in my sleep.

Here is a shape made of silence. A dark bloom:
cells within cells, watched by a thousand quiet endings

spreading? Grief is such a mass, perhaps, when left unspoken:
a metastasis of memory in a land that names the stranger alien.

I am trying to reach mine, cannot find where it begins.
It arrived before language, encoded in the spiral of blood,

older than my name. Like starlight long gone, still arriving.
I squint into the most distant layer of stars: fine dust.

Some of it shines from bodies long dead,
their last emissions only now arriving

here. Their light arrives always without their names
like a jagged, cracked-open ledge,

this brief flesh against it,
struggling to sound.

*

This poem recently appeared in Sky Island Journal, Issue 35.