physics loosened. Material things blurred. In class I saw the metal chair’s particles move. It was all so Newtonian. I taught the mechanics of meter to students nodding off and at night the Old Poets’ syllables stair-stepped around my room. Why should the apple, asked Newton, always descend perpendicularly to the ground? Why should the chalk fall to the linoleum, the stack of papers fly across the floor? Inelegant movements of the sleepless. Long nights I would make my phone bright and watch the simulated stock ticker make senseless money for people I will never see. Across the country men make invisible machines in a room, I imagine, dark and whirring with the noises their monitors emit. In Minot, North Dakota, for instance, drone operations target men we will no longer, signed papers say, torture. We will not keep them from sleep or force-feed them rectally. We will not touch them. Once we mastered gravity wasn’t distance a thing of the past. That the earth draws it down, the fruit, the flight, as matter, Newton found, draws the earth back to it. In California nights are clear and frenzied. And in the morning my students explained why they dislike the spondee. For its excessive force.