I suppose that's how they live,
like suicides. I dream often of them
without this body. I resent
this creaking, of course, but you
once looked at me in that way
I wanted. When I look long ago enough
sometimes you still speak. It's the heights
and the grey that gets to me. The stairs,
and the stares I give down to them
when climbing more floors. This cocooning,
I wonder it. Its ending.
To leap undiscovered for a few seconds
and flutter. Couldn't.
I'm living. The child's pretty silence
of match-playing, that light, that living, that
no-reason of everything looking
like this at all: this strange
clicking, the pulls of the iris,
the lens-widening, the swallowing
blackness the center of a looking that
I once thought was new. Like it,
the skyscraping growth of any tree
deciding against earth, I look pretty.
And short.