OBEDIENCE TO THE FORCE OF GRAVITY

Meghan Maguire Dahn

— Simone Weil

Where I grew up, a hundred years before I was born, the women raised silkworms on pallets tucked into the walls. At night you could hear them chew on mulberry leaves until there was enough nothing to make something. In the dark wanting is a kind of erasure from which you recover less and less. When you wear silk remember the worm, remember that to relate one thing to another is how to let the light in through the meshes of death. If you can touch the next to the next you can wrap yourself in all the light you cannot know on your own in America, where to live anywhere is to promise you will die.