Sir Issac Newton sat beneath an apple tree,

finding refuge from me and my fury

at his economical ordering

of a scotch-on-the-rocks-hold-the-rocks

and pondered hackneyed,

the word he’d used to describe I love you,

a phrase not to be overused.

I’d wanted to hear them.

I wanted to hear those hackneyed words

every goddam day

while he played a ukulele outside my window

(preferably in the rain),

and I wanted them carved in a tree trunk,

in every tree trunk in the fucking forest

while he pirouetted about like Orlando in Arden

at their mere utterance,

and he did not know why,

when the apple knocked him on the head,

he felt his eyes well

the moment he knew

we fall because our mass and the earth’s mass

are inversely proportional

to the square of the distance between us.