You falter,
one foot
dangling seamlessly
in midair
before
dropping;

the moment of the fall,
the transcendence of it
makes me wonder if I could go
ahead;

could I explode
into a million
glittering
pieces
and launch myself
past the stars into the
mass gyrating grave of
four million suns?

into a dark not even
light
can escape?

Could I just
suspend there,
at the edge of the
gyre,
feeling my body
lull
into
half-time.

Could I watch, then,
as the Earth spun
in real-time,
allowing me a very
modest
amount of years for
life to settle;
returning when the
time is
right.

My body,
compounding
back into solid flesh,
plunking back to Earth,
just as I had left,
a weeping puppet,
and I’d pretend
as if I’d been there
all this time.

My mother,
small thick and
sixty-two this year.

I know her advice on daily measures
resonates much deeper than I admit;
always seeming to pry at that
lone heart-string.

Sometimes, when I am home alone,
I go through her things;
her old photographs,
her high school yearbooks,
her letters;

and I read them.

I imagine her this way:
young, like me,
and in love,
married,
driving a babyblue
Volkswagen Beetle,

telling of how it was the
best car
she ever drove;
the American Dream.

I like to think
my mother
was a pin-up girl instead;
her peroxide hair
glowing in the sun;
the summer of 1971.

I am from a Good Samaritan,
a cesarian birth.
I am from a green thumb, born

into garden gloves;
my mother’s leather hands.  
I am from Hyacinths and Begonias,

from Chrysanthemums,
and Black-eyed Susan’s.
I am from the river,

struggling against the white waters,
her hands supporting my underside.
I am from those summer evenings

spent snatching fireflies from the stars;
our cheeks glowing in their radiance.
I am from the dirt beneath fingernails,

the airless August sun,
and a long day on the trowel.
I am from pulled weeds, and those

precious things blossomed
and grown too soon.

As migrants from our own pious bodies,
we held hands through pouring rain and
ran from those things which hoped to keep us.

We submerged ourselves deep into the Cuyahoga,
letting the currents ease us away from our lives;
her pacifism, something much more to learn from.

We let the water glaze our skin with rich culture
and vagrant God’s who’d settled along her banks.
We thought it chance that life would become

something much bigger than we’d planned.
We designed skyscrapers to build with our
hands as we’d tightrope across wire cables

high over upper-Manhattan or someplace grandeur.
We let our tears fall from rainclouds and hummed
along to the soft music which played inside of us.

Young nights grew into days as we learned
how to use our youthful bodies as something
more than for breathing and running.

We read books for the promise of a greater tale--
maps for the promise of finding ourselves
through the devilish hellfire of the Arizona

desert.  We thirsted for love and found it on
park benches and back seats.  We prayed to the
Sun God’s that this summer would last an eternity.

It was the night your hands lingered in the pockets of your coat.
You didn’t reach out and touch me,
didn’t offer a hand to say hello.
You sipped from the flask in your pocket,
told me how you really enjoyed the book,
and that Kafka was one of the great
theologians of our time.

You pointed out constellations I couldn’t see,
and talked about Dante like you’d
been having lunch.
You impressed me with your knowledge of
what makes a grilled cheese good,
and remembered that it was my favorite food.

We drank dark beers, I let you tell me a story
I had already heard.
I laughed at it again, like it was new.

Your cigarette hung from your mouth so effortlessly,
I wanted to pluck it from between your lips,
light it, and take a long drag.

I wanted to lean out into the universe around us,
interrupt space and take those
cigarette lips into mine.

I watched your hands ring around themselves,
knuckles swollen and tight.
A scar puckering the skin above your thumb--

We walked by the river,
I asked if you like to swim.
You laughed.

Did you think I meant to do it now?
Peel off my clothes one by one,
hoist myself up on the ledge,
creamy, unpuckered white skin glowing
under the pale moon.

I would have done it.
I would have dived.

Taken one small leap and
sunk my lonely body in that mud;
gritty and ,
the clay
of the Earth clouding the water,
soot settled down around me.

I would have done it,
I would have jumped if you only
told me you liked to swim.

It seems that
we’ve come as
far as ever --

a growing
extinction of
the great divide

crowding itself
and suffocating
we’ve come all

this way
who are we to say
that birds do not

fly
into the sun
who are we to judge

how any person
can be in love--
for we,

two souls,
walk this Earth,
hands pressed against

our mouths
to keep us from vomiting
up our demons

keep us from spitting
up.
it’s been too long

and we’ve come too far
to turn back
and march again.