— after Salvador Dali’s Homage to Newton
The beating heart is no joke. I have seen,
swung in its place, the short leash
of a pendulum weighing heavily,
ball and chain. In the space
of human conscience rests the weight of the world,
a head expanded on thick shoulders and thinning
wrists. Atlas has nothing on this stranger’s
open crown. There is no shrinking ribcage—only the imagining
of our imagining of a geocentric world stayed
by a hand on a fallen apple at one man’s feet.