After Remedios Varo’s Phenomenon of Weightlessness
You haven't left this house in months.
You are stuck in this chamber,
feeling the heft of your body,
struggling to find your balance
as the angles of these windows
and walls shift forward
and space warps inward,
as your knowledge becomes relative,
as you follow a globe
that has become weightless,
as it traces the course of the moon,
as the room rotates
and folds in on itself,
as you say, This can't
possibly be happening.
You fancy yourself a scientist
afraid of losing your footing.
You don't believe in magic,
but you are staring at the proof,
and you feel the gravity of your state,
and you discover you don't know
anything, as this world slips
from your grasp. You observe
the curvature in the cosmos
and realize the wrongness
of the laws you used to hold as truths.
There is no force between masses.
And yet, you are tethered to Earth,
along with those other models fixed
to the shelf. See, they are not
floating. And you are still here.
Aren’t you?
Find faith that your feet
are still rooted to a ground
that may or may not be the ceiling.
Victoria Nordlund is an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut and lead master teaching artist at The Mark Twain House & Museum. Her poetry collection Binge Watching Winter on Mute was published by Main Street Rag in June 2019. She is a Best of the Net and 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominee, whose work has appeared in PANK Magazine, Rust+Moth, Pidgeonholes, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. Visit her at VictoriaNordlund.com