The Tendency of Dropped Objects to Fall
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The air is thick with gods, crowded streets
rife with them, an infestation of
divinity, “the servant-keeping class.”
What shape wants them? Memory
is money and what wind wants to do
with it is scatter. Wind doesn’t. Want
doesn’t. Assembles the materials for bodies
drifting through the past on rubber rafts,
with plastic oars they don’t know
how to use. Blank, wounded, or rendered otherwise
helpless. Justice admires John
but never tells him so (better to break
than to be broken), establishing a proper format
for suffering. So many laborers
have elapsed, “the torturable classes”
singing Deus. Singing Without money
we’ll all die. They’ve all died. History
leaves no witnesses, a when and why,
a where and what became
of them. In exile Andromache’s handmaid
builds a miniature Troy with toothpicks
and superglue, with matchsticks
from a story that she read: a helpless shining
glitter with tinfoil walls and someone
rolls over it in his sleep. The notes read
that is Not loved, or I shall totally
remove. Or Be wealthy, that is
Not my people. With us. I was. In
me. Draw near. Head bowed,
still thinking and.
—Reginald Shepherd
Reginald Shepherd's fourth book of poems, Otherhood, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He lives in Pensacola, Florida.
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