Falling Bodies: A Poem

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¤

FALLING BODIES

I am not

alone in watching

my body giving up

its truths, the dark

taint of the dye

job giving way

to the gray, the fallen

breasts, the slope and folds

of my mother-marked

belly mound.

I’m not yet

fifty and already I’ve out-

lived some I’ve seen

naked, the lovers I left,

the children I watched

die. I’ve long known how to

look for the bullet left

lodged in the chamber

when unloading the gun.

My aim isn’t

so good nor my vision.

It’s getting harder

and harder to read without

pushing the page farther

from my eyes.

I haven’t seen

Tía since before

the outbreak, only the sign

outside the nursing

home proclaiming

its name: Buena Vida.

In another time

of plague, Galileo observed

the speed of falling

bodies, how, no matter

the differing weight

of two objects, falling

is an equalizing force.

Imagine them, he wrote,

joining together while falling.

Sometimes when you watch

someone die the only

sound you hear is your own

shredded breath. Other

times only their ragged

gasps rending the garment

of this realm.

I watch the circling

hand touch every number,

hear the seconds stacking

themselves into minutes

hours days weeks months,

the teetering years collapsing

behind me, before me.

I’ve had to give up

running since I tore

something in my hip

the same one where

years ago I rested

the baby and years

before that I dipped

and flared on the dancefloor.

My back now gives way

when I bend over to pull

the load of soaked clothes

from the machine. The doctor

says only resistance

and movement will begin

to repair what’s torn.

At the end of the march

I bend toward the ground

with the others kneeling

in silence for eight minutes

forty-six seconds, spinning

hover of helicopter blades

and my daughter’s fidgeting

hands the only sounds I hear.

At the end of his life, half-

blinded by cataracts, Galileo still

found a way to measure

the distance between bodies

scattered across the sky, observed

the ways the moon rocked itself

back and forth as if saying

no against the night.

My daughter watches

her dancing body on the video

she’s made in the living

room. Another brown girl has

filmed us all kneeling. Another

woman’s daughter has taken a cell

phone video of a man as he is

murdered in the street.

All the girls watching.

When we watch, we watch

someone, someone maybe we

love or someone maybe we don’t

even know, someone who is

someone’s grown

child dying under the knee

of another, the sound we hear is his

muddled breath, his crying out

for his mother, long gone and risen

and rocking and rocking and

rocking him still.

¤

Deborah Paredez is the author of the poetry volume, This Side of Skin, and the critical study, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory.