Free Fall
At first he's making better and better time
in his descent toward an unavoidable
necessarily inevitable
conclusion against a remarkable-looking surface
no longer keeping its distance or its place
in the scheme of things and then the worldly limit
of acceleration thirty-two feet per second
per second in free fall will slow his body down
to a rough four hundred while he enjoys
the interval to notice the steadily
increasing size of the earth the inexorable
enlargement of its horizon the revelation
of all its topographical details
its clarifying and intensifying colors
and shades of meaning if he were a mouse
or any smaller creature and had the luck
to land where he wouldn't immediately be drowned
impaled or run over he'd go bouncing away
as good as new but as a heavyweight
contender and thinker he comes down now
to earth with entirely too much emphasis.
-- David Wagoner
(from Southwest Review
and Verse Daily: 2007)
David Wagoner is the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2009.
