In physics quizzes, we live on an earth
that musters average apples by the peck.
Children drop some from rooftops. Some fall
from stunt pilots’ tiffins. Others tumble
through the Eiffel Tower’s iron fretwork,
never grazing a strut. And all to the tune
of a single Newton. Converted to meters,
the height from which a fruit falls
can be multiplied by one, and everything
comes out in joules; that’s the earth’s work.
. . .
Our teacher never did trust us with trains.
We solved for force times distance
and the force was always gravity, always
the planet’s summons on something
much smaller. The largest plummet we tried
was a diver, four hundred Newtons
soaking wet. She jackknifed into a pool,
no pikes or tucks, from a slab ten meters high.
. . .
Remoteness is built in: our distance from
the apple-littered ground cannot be none. No,
work’s a whoosh, a must, a plot to get the worldly
returned to the grave, sweet world.
–
Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and Poetry, as well as other journals and magazines.