It’s everywhere,

decreases with distance while never fully arriving at zero.

Orbits are born of perfect symmetry between 

a body’s forward motion and the tug of gravity from 

another body. Gravity plays tetherball with galaxies.

The week we knew you were leaving, 

gravity set snowflakes along electrical 

wires, offered them to the trees to collect and carry

like bright goblets on a windless day.

Quantum equations fall apart when they try

to include gravity. The science of the very small,

irreconcilable with the weight of your hand.

All things with mass or energy 

gravitate towards one another—the earth 

meeting us after every leap. 

But it’s more complicated.

Gravitational fields bend the light of millions of suns.

Revolving celestial bodies twist the fabric

of the universe around themselves like 

spaghetti around a fork, and I don’t pretend

to understand much of this, but I can say that the day

you unfastened from your body, the earth did not

fling us outward as it spun. 

After 41 days and nights orbiting your bedside, 

I didn’t fall apart in the wake of your death, except 

for when I did, 

and because time and space are not absolute, 

the universe built not of things, but of happenings—

a twist of interrelated events—you haven’t 

stopped happening.

And because gravity shapes the medium

through which sound travels, I still speak to you, held

and changed by your presence—

by the fact of a body’s weight, reduced

to fistfuls of ash, given to the river, borne along

by the current.