Alberto Rios
I FELL TO THE FLOOR, AND KEPT ON
1
I fell to the floor and kept falling.
The shore of the ground
Stopped me, at first,
The way I expected.
The way the world expects, the way
It had stopped me every time before this.
But pure mathematics, pure chance,
This one time, this single time,
Perhaps ever in the history of the world
But having always been possible,
This one time, something happened:
Something happened in all the broken parts of me,
All the separate things that combined to be me,
The trillion trillion cells.
2
I could not with my eyes see those cells as broken apart,
But they were some loose confederation
That made me, some uneasy cells
Holding hands with each other for now.
This time they spilled through and around and in a heat past
The trillion separate barriers of the ground,
The ground's cells themselves holding hands only loosely,
All of this a game of Red Rover, all these cells
Mimicking those Fifties movies of so many people
Going through turnstiles to get into the subway.
These trillion cells and these trillion barriers
This one time moving easily and quickly by each other,
Each with its golden ticket, with no need for security,
Each one smiling, each on its way, everything moving.
3
They passed by each other like water through a grate
In some perverse version of Have a Nice Day.
each moving in orderly, if rushed, fashion,
Having paid attention during all those fire drills,
All those things they said: Be calm, leave your stuff.
We—all the parts of me and All the Parts of the Ground,
We were matched in our minute mismatch.
I went through and past and by and around and onward
With nothing to stop me and me polite enough
Not to stop anything going in the other direction,
Going up, busily going up as I was busily falling,
But falling made new as stepping through the Ground
Into the outer space of deep underneath,
Into the vast frontier of the spaces-in-between.
4
I had stepped into what had only seemed like darkness, like hardness.
It was as if I had walked into a movie theater,
Dark already the moment before the movie starts.
I could not see left or right.
It was a big darkness, wide and deep and high,
An elephant black, a whale black,
Loam- and oil- and obsidian-colored black.
I felt as if I were falling instead of sitting,
As if the movie theater seat were suddenly adrift
In a vast water.
I recognized this place as a dream ground.
I had stood on it before, standing and not standing.
Here, the sky was full of anti-stars, of also-stars,
Quartz and glass buttons, tin lids and dimes.
5
Mirror shards and cellophane seen at a distance—
If this were a dream, all these things combined into what might be stars.
But they might be stars, the stars of this new place.
These were the stray things that had fallen into the ground
Before me, but in the same way I had fallen,
The way things fall through a sewer grate
Far enough that they can't be reached, traveling
By chance, out of hand, too fast, beyond reflex.
And this might be a dream. But it is not a dream
In that I push something black,
Something my hands see, push off hard and backward,
My good fortune holding—
The same way I fell in, I force myself back out.
The polite passing and exchanging of cells, luckily, still at work.
6
I am—just as quickly as it happened—back on my knees in the kitchen,
My hands firm now on the ground of the floor
As they have been ten thousand times before.
I get up and dust myself off, shake my head.
When I fell, gravity called where space did not—
Space, Up, had never been a friend.
But falling was easy, comfortable, falling
Toward it, whatever it was, gravity
That great voice, those big hands
Waving me in. It was no work or trouble at all.
I am uneasy, now, and slower in my walk these days.
I trip easily still
As sometimes I step into the ground
Now that I know the way.
Alberto Rios