Fri., Mar. 27

He liked the clatter,
the rattle, the battering
of the balls against each other
and around the vast funneled bowl
where he was dropping them,
in handfuls,
down the track that spun them 'round.
The display was meant to teach something
about gravity, or momentum, or spin
but it just makes me think of
black holes,
a space ship or planet
orbiting to doom,
and disappearance.
(Except here the dimensional rift
pops out in a tray underneath.)
When my son tired of the scoop and drop
and thundering roll of handfuls of balls,
the last few played out their hand
undisturbed by random tangents.
Their steady whirl slowed even a boy's eyes,
watching them dance within and beyond
each other's rule bound path.
Two found each other with a crack,
snapping back in reversed course,
and smacking into one another square once again,
then spinning down into the throat of black.
The last few drew tighter and tighter
to the game's close, and then one,
and finally the other,
spun undone into the unreachable,
irrevocable drop --
but the last one found the line,
where a wall-clinging rotation
grew faster and faster
while whirring with
insistence, and
persistence,
to an unbearable
pitch until it
plunked
down,
gone.
"OK, let's go."
If only I could walk away so calmly,
not reading any needless meaning into that display,
about gravity, or momentum, or entropy, or something.