“Love is metaphysical gravity.”
— Buckminster Fuller
At 12,000 feet I grip the ogling hole of the cargo door. The earth, its green flannels jaggedly sewn, seems to loop as one step out my feet salute and pirouette on blue. Then a tug from the drogue shoot points me belly down. This is gravity sucking. The deafening whoosh of air makes a commotion in my sleeves as good things approach: dirt, pasture, a scattering of trees like burrs on a pant leg. All good things suck. How the sun sucks earth through orbit! How earth’s massive temerity sucks me fast to its rind. How within me saline orbits suck blood from bone. We are each from a notion suckled. Our forebears were sucked aground from the salt wound of an ocean. A brown newborn, waxy and plump, is primed for life’s inaugural motion. All good things are made new by sucking. The buckling of grass beneath snow cannot last. The sun is sucking clouds from ground water. The sun is lapping dew off clover. The rock heft of orbs is a ploy for making orbits. Only orbits accrue. There is no endless straight line through. There is the rhythm of breath sucked in from a vastness. There is the sigh of soiled breath sucked clean again by green. The leaves do it in silence: they are sucking nectar from light. The fire in its eloquent dappling sucks rings of sun that lie coiled in wood. The frail bubble of atmosphere is an exhalation sucked high and sheer. The moon tends her garden of inundations and beats the waves senseless. Stars interrupt a black canopy of sky and suck darkness inside out. The mind, like a child with a mixing bowl, sucks clean to the cranium its delight. And I am an element unloosed, flotsam in the ether, tidbit in a tailspin. I plunge through orbits, drawn by the inestimable love of earth. Love, too, sucks. All good things do. All things true are forged in the gulf of sucking.
