I fell from a bike today, hard.
At sixty eight, four feet seems not so far
until whacked by gravity
without an intervention. I lay awhile, stunned.
Cracked ribs, bleeding knees.

A friend said, was it age
or carelessness? I said, surprised
he didn’t know, it was a butterfly
in Singapore
whose breeze had
turned the wheel aside, or perhaps

God’s well known finger, flicked
a warning, personal to me, or
just a poke, a nudge, a tease,

then again, the swinging hips
of a sundressed girl across the
street, a memory, an equation
exploding out of nowhere
that explains what swings the earth
around the sun, the sun
around the galaxy,
the galaxy around its tiny
bit of universe like
crack the whip. I got dizzy.

The equation worked on me.

I Fell From a Bike Today
Will Kirkland
Winter, 2012