The Grammar of Gravity

April 25, 2016

Happy National Poetry Month from Stance on Dance!

BY SEBASTIAN GRUBB, ILLUSTRATION BY LIZ BRENT

 

the grammar of gravity

falls swiftly now

into place, the punctuated particulate

precipitates marvelously down,

outlines figures by dropping, swinging

syllables by the ears,

swinging

language’s skeleton by the hands,

finger bones twirling their spiral mark

in air, the thick of it, the between-us,

our thoughts-as-knives would cut it, slice

into loaves, we eat

every chunky syntax,

every hardboiled semantic pile,

the metaphors and aphorisms,

the alliterations of the illiterate,

we eat

by the spoonful, by the moon-full,

opening wide to receive,

we make our danced words part

of skin and bone,

dripping to planet.

 

all words fall

once velocity leaves them,

suspended for a moment, arcing gloriously,

then rushing and twisting as the earth tugs—

we scramble to make sense before

curve of vowel and edge of consonant

strike down in a series of tiny thuds—

you would miss them, most do,

if you weren’t listening,

if you weren’t looking to be moved

by the grammar of gravity.

Witten 3/13/16. Sebastian Grubb is a contemporary dancer, choreographer and teacher, and runs Sebastian’s Functional Fitness, an outdoor fitness program based in San Francisco. Learn more at www.sebastiangrubb.com.