“I Can’t”

The degrees of unknowing we’re born with are strangely

quite different between and among us: they’ve swung us,

in fact, to believe we’re inarguably this or that. They might

not be wrong. Take you, who in baby fat probably knew from

the womb that the first time you’d glance at the room they

would put you to crawl in you’d long for and relish its space:  

instantly grasp its equations as if you’d created them –

understood with precision so fine, so aligned with your vision

not only of where Up and Down led, but how they would rise

in their likely trajectories out into limitlessness: calculating

just where they would lead in the cosmos you knew from

a glance at the sky was all infinite fact. Your simple grace

with the spatial gave climbing a chair or a sofa or bed such

performative ease – you precocious adept apparatus!

Well, darling you had us – while babbling rapidly, happily on

to your confidant Gravity; less a made-up bestie than a favorite

aunt. And then out of nowhere came those two unthinkable

words – wailed in anguish, intoned like a dirge: “I can’t.”

You’d heard a bird make noise. Gravity, with whom as usual

you sat, beamed with pleasure like a petted cat. She effused:

“What fluidity! The bell, the jewel in that note!” (To you it was

monotonously meaningless and tediously rote.) “What poise!”

“How it annoys!” your tone was flat. “Noise, my ass,” spat

back the suddenly irascible Aunt Gravitas. “That’s music.”

What was it for? Who in command of their senses would

choose it? Lose it, refuse it. Others heard a melody. That

burned. You never learned the thrill, and never will, they

said this thing would bring. You didn’t sing. You wouldn’t.

Nor imitate a pitch. You couldn’t. You’d never dance.

You’d always plod. But you could measure space like God.

.