Gravity is odorless as God, and like God is everywhere, invisibleand weightless, inside and between what in its absence could haveno inside or between, no mass or form to get free or give in to itwith.In a vacuum there is no falling, or if there is, because everything bigand small is falling at the same speed, at the same time, you can’t tellfalling from floating.In hospice, my father cried like a baby in a wet crib, eyes shut,inconsolable, because I couldn’t be his mother, or, if I could, couldonly be the sleep-deprived postpartum mother who can’t lifther massive body from the quicksand of exhaustion, too sunk inheaviness to do anything about what by then she only wanted to berid of, whispering shhh, shhh, shhh to his runaway accelerating OO Os as if to slow them to a canter, a trot, a standstill,and when his heart stopped and the busily communicating cellsinside the hand that held mine forgot what they were saying, orthat they were even cells, or that the hand had ever been a hand,unballing its viselike fist from around my fingers, gravitywas all that held body to bed, bed to hospice, hospice to earth.Its micro-grip tightened on every subatomic bit of every particlethere was, on everything I had pretended right up to then it wasn’tpulling down.When I stood up my father was the force I stood up against.Invisible and weightless as the piss stink rising from the bed, whichlike a baby he had wet, the inside of his thighs were rash red, hisgrizzled ball sack even redder between the scorched white pubichairs.Only once the odor had spread everywhere and covered everythingcould you not smell it. Not smelling it was grace, which is theopposite of gravity, from which there’s no escape.