Gregory Byrd                              (LD)
Theory of Gravity

Imagine you wake at five thirty to a DJ's careful voice.
You turn on a bedside lamp and on the wall, a damselfly
as if in space, weightless.
Perhaps it came in with the cats,
perhaps when you did, maybe through some small entrance
in your falsely tight house.
You know you should trap it in a whiskey glass--
in a little dome of pure alcoholic air--
slide a postcard from Paraguay beneath its weightless feet
and carry it to the back door where it could rise
into the dawning sky.
You have faith in your own gentleness,
reach for the little folded wings,
use them as a simple handle.
But as if to confirm that even your most benign motions
are murderous without compassion,
your fingers clutch the thread-thin body as well,
crush it in your most gracing grip.
Even in your cupped hands
it tears against your calluses.
When you reach the back porch and the starred morning sky
and let the thing loose, it only struggles into the air,
pitching and dipping--no longer a predator
but a perfect opportunity for a quick bird
to take it further into the sky.
And imagine then that you fly to your brother's bedside,
listen to his wife talk about morphine drips and radiation,
that you tell her to go home and sleep.
You see his closed eyes move
as if they were something trying to escape.
You hold his thin hand
as if your breath could break it,
as if you were the one who could let him out.

Originally published in Tampa Review, 1998
Nominated for Pushcart Prize
Salt and Iron,  Snake Nation Press, 2014