If the Physics of Falling Is an Allegory for Existence by Roy Bentley
1. ACME Circus Company
That was Harmony, hoping to get the circus
listed first in the phone books. She got the idea,
she said, much later, from the Human Cannonball
who could bench-press many times his body weight
and was wicked-smart. Then, Harmony loved the art of
managing ten or twelve railroad cars of animals. Caricatures
of what is still being allowed to pass for human beings.
She said the ACME label worked like a charm—said
more than one Chamber of Commerce businessman-suit
optioning entertainment said that it felt wrong, and right
dialing the first listing he’d come to. Which was the place
she’d say the Human Cannonball was an expert on falling
and give him credit for the listing-name. Humble person.
I met Harm booking that circus of hers—straighforward
exchanges along the lines of this-is-what-I-can-afford-and-
what-will-it-buy-me dialogues ending with a three-day visit.
Scheduling arrival and departure times, I asked for a bond
against Acts of God and the failure to appear as contracted.
She says it’s why she loves me to this day: that I knew
the figure it would take for her to know I valued her, too.
2. A Plummeter’s Guide to the Physics of Falling Objects
Let’s begin with you skydiving, tandem,
noticing the scrolls of smoke drafting from
the flare the instructor wants you to observe.
You guess that it’s there largely to distract you,
the flare, flower-tresses of red a bright backdrop.
All around you, the boulevards of pending grasses
send up shadow-valentines of sweet warning to say
the planet has no business rising to meet the Falling.
But that’s how it seems, skydivers say: the earth is
rising. Which isn’t true. Call it The Elevator Effect.
On the ground, someone points to a bird that he says
was struck—an American Crow. It’s no raven, given
the size and strike-altitude. The bird present in a group
whereas ravens run in pairs. Shrewd-smart birds, both.
You’re hearing that divers have been hit by meteorites
but never birds. What you smell has lots of names—
you’re confident you kept you sphincter locked tight.
Deferentially, the instructor raises her goggles. Laughs.
You say that, while falling, you recall James Dickey,
his poem “The Performance,” where a soldier does all
the tricks he can before the Japanese cut his head off
and he falls, headless, into a grave. Light thinning on
billboarded horizon, someone has come forth to say
the crow must be up, and all right, since it’s flown.
3. And Every Cell of Creation Opened Its Mouth to Drink Grace
—Joy Harjo, “By the Way” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2016)
A promised job in New Jersey sent us home
with nothing to buy a house but my VA loan.
For her, stories were proof of wounding at the
hands of her wheelchair-bound mother or funny
in the way her father’s joke about a “can of pee”
and canopy bed is amusing once. Maybe twice.
One story was of a sister pinning her to the floor
under a dangle of saliva meant to tease. Trust me,
to bully. Look closely. See if you aren’t visioning
the thick cord of spittle fake-launched. Launched.
Lonely is the child and lovely are the russet eyes
flashing as she raises a slurry of damning spells.
I’d like a spell for those who took everything.
Once, in Wisconsin; then, in Florida where we
loved sun, the starry dark as surprising as a
dropped handkerchief. No one gets out what
they put in. It’s not even close. Nevertheless,
sooner of later, they’ll pin you down. Spit.
4. The Qualifications of Working As a Fortune Teller
This isn’t a calling to be entered into lightly. Although
anyone can do a thing, that class of democratic thinking
ends at the wisdom in knowing that not everyone should.
But, all right, say you’re clairvoyant. A psychic prodigy.
What Billy Collins would call the bread and the knife.
In his poem, he reaches into a painting—what if I reach
into Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam and slap
away Old Gray Beard’s hand? What if I did just that,
calling attention to the shape in the background behind
God and the angels? See the halo-shaped cloud encircling?
Is any of this helping you decide if the telling of fortunes
is in your future? All morning, I watched a squirrel mad-
scamper a stairway-to-heaven of black locust branches—
if any of us is the bread and the knife, it’s a squirrel
storied into at least one future, thanks to a poem.
It’s always Forever in a poem unless some asshole
set’s fire to the world, completing crumbling futures
you’d like not to foretell. What is coming to pass is,
if you follow any part of this, you’re a fit. Go ahead.
Opened your heart to what soundlessness says in words
of wind. Or, as we say in the Midwest, the Mysteries.
5. Bastard
My father had a ’48 Plymouth. A beast-car
with an interior a kid could get lost in. Seats
that smelled of Old Spice Aftershave Lotion,
L & M cigarettes, and gasoline. Taken together,
they were my father’s smell—he adored cars and
told me he was in the Army and overseas in Korea
before he realized his gift. His mother (Susan) had,
years before, when he was a boy, been shuttled off
to the state sanitarium in Frankfort. He was raised
by relatives who couldn’t agree with his mother
loosing bullets towards the man—a married man who
said that he wasn’t in the habit of supporting bastards.
He said it like you’d spit out on e of the Devil’s names,
and my grandmother with a gun she knew how to use.
The story goes, she emptied a Colt and was reloading
when a sheriff stopped her. Maybe my dad figured
if things went bad (the wheels came off, so to speak,
as they had for her), he’d have that Goliath with the
hawk’s-beak hood. He had to rebuild the carburetor
in the rain more than once, so there were hood-dents
from his fists. One in the shape of the Commonwealth
of the Great State of Kentucky. To say he was angry
is tamping it down. To say he had a sort of need to slap
or slug someone—anyone, and soon—would be right.
6. The One-Night Cheap Hotel of Divinity
Answering All Arguments to the Contrary
That’s what our god graduated from, if there is one
a God although insisting on one is magical thinking.
So gobbledygook spawned God—rabbis and priests
and mullahs talk this rabbi- or priest or mullah-speak.
Without physical knowledge of God beyond The Torah
and Talmud, The Quran and Miles Davis. Nevertheless,
given the argument against the existence of an afterlife
posed using General Systems Theory—if there is a Deity,
she has an apocalyptic bent to her, and is a drama queen—
which centers around the nature of systems and subsystems.
What’s the name on her diploma?—The One-Night Cheap
Hotel of Divinity Answering All Arguments to the Contrary.
Which correspondence doctoral program? I won’t laugh—
we draw Whoopi-Goldberg-on-a-Good-Day kindhearted-God?
That explains a lot. Mercy in a mini-skirt, stiletto high-heels,
dreadlocks. Striking but busy filling the job of being God.
And passing the buck back to that old standby Free Will.
7. If the Physics of Falling is an Allegory for Existence
Questioning things has always been my true north.
So if the physics of falling is an allegory for existence,
then why not ask what hands will hammock your falling?
Am I hearing William Wordsworth? the Divine in nature?
Wordsworth’s connection with the earth is a connection
to something akin to the Divine Spark—and now I’m
thinking of my sister Steph and her friend Ann Colliver
setting fire to the garbage cans behind our house in Ohio.
I was in the Air Force and on active duty in another state
and so I missed my father swearing as he put out the blaze
by himself and tried to put things right. The world is on fire.
But if it had been the handiwork of kids, general mischief,
responsible parties would still be getting yelled at. As if
there’s no fixing it, is there? And no end to the scorching.
A big-for-her-age ten-year-old, in rainbows-and-unicorns
pajamas, has come out form a bedroom to face the music.
See her pausing in the hallway to beg mercy or promise
an impersonation of the kid in The Exorcist in which she
will start swearing up a not-nice storm. See her making
her mouth dramatically shape the phrase It’s your call.
