Gravitate

When you find only part of a turtle shell, caramel

and wormy as a path, you wonder where the turtle

went, whether a boy ran over it biking, or birds bit

and flew, all of nature doing the rest, imagining turtle

look, as a green-and-yellow human, only tiny, minus

a shell, so far from creek, its gravitating, disintegrating,

dried-ear wax on the obverse side, but if you continue

walking past woods to the route along a railroad track,

you’ll face west to be overcome by a town of tree frogs

that you will count in the bog to which they gravitate;

rails’ western terminus at Union Station in Chicago,

and in the east at New Center in Detroit; northside

in the marsh, and south, a rolling hill that gravitates

toward more woods, and the far women gravitating

together, away from their laundry lines, as liquid

in the body gravitates from waters of heaven

to basin of below; we lean toward that which takes

us, and give to that which becomes us, as a stir-

crazy baby in her carriage, mothered outside, being

pushed, wheels gravitating to one as I am, writing 

poems east toward –opolis, -agiac, -ids, or -egon,

gravitating to words, one to each, one to another,

parts to a whole, points west – in coming home,

I open myself to a space seemingly twice as large

as when I left, being twice as hungry as a turtle

listening only to sounds it hears in a bog of frogs.

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Jan Wiezorek writes from Michigan. His work appears, or is forthcoming, in The London Magazine, The Westchester Review, Lucky Jefferson, The Broadkill Review, and Loch Raven Review. He taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago and wrote the ebook Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011). Wiezorek posts at janwiezorek.substack.com.