"Time lost its absolute character . . ."
–Einstein

The Wilsons lived across the street,
and when kids knocked,
he gave us apples after school.
Years later we read she died of head wounds,
the hobo stepping in her blood,
running without taking anything.

I fly to my old neighborhood,
a street God kept so calm
the houses might have been
stitched on quilt squares.
When sunlight twists, I remember:
Mr. Wilson through a window,
shouting. Raising a hammer.

Then everything I thought gives way.
I fall in the giddy arc
from adoration into loathing,
clutching anything to hang onto
the way we grasp the arm rests
in the plane before
the pilot pitches us into space,
the spider web of metal quivering
around us.

What street can we be safe on?
Even the earth we cling to
is nothing but a twirling ball,
singing through a dark void,
and our faces, breasting the wind,
eyes dreaming like the figureheads on ships.
Even God is motion.