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i once jumped out of an airplane.
yeah, i was with others who all thought the air would save us, even though it had no eyes and hands to hold us tight and close, loving each of us who dared to trust the ropes and cloth that could have been laundered and folded neatly by some woman who never watched television or ate pizza. i asked many times but no one told me about the little dog inside me who fell out the window. we barked and howled, but not all the way down. there was no siren, no alarm bell, only the grassy hills and an arrow on the ground pointing at something. i don’t remember anymore at what, just like the professor down in front trying to explain something. i was wearing a white jumpsuit, and i made sure to use the outhouse often enough so that the jumpsuit wouldn’t change colors at the sudden mad moment when i let go of the strut and saw the wing get smaller and smaller. the wind nearly blew off my glasses. i now know why paratroopers in the movies yell “geronimo!” when they jump — so no one hears the little dogs bark. i think i saw a white flower when i got done with falling. i looked around to make sure i wasn’t on fire. later i heard tall grasses tell their adventure stories. it was so long ago the trees don’t remember how many times i looked carefully at the dirt when i practiced dying.
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i captured an asteroid cold
as a lilac’s garden so cold a woman's flower has no scent careen a rocket among children preening with their eyelids the bright stars sinking deeper in the sad mud of this nation i wander and rocks stop lying tailless crystals burrow in the flaming sand and disappear like me who leaps over cars and trucks and spray-paints a poem on spain, france or chile a poem thin as someone flying in a hole in the ground with a child's wing a poem i stole from a lilac petal floating cold and lonely among the stars wandering in oaxaca a photograph
of yosemite lies crumpled in the pocket of a nurse who wraps the wind around her mamacita’s neck. the nurse warms the wind so it won’t remind her of the sea, or the time when horses were some other animal changing slowly into long-lost street musicians who cry and holler at the hollow sky until all the couples tie themselves in knots, ancient and silent, lost men and women coated with oil that seeps from a symphony in the park, before it was written on all the leaves, fill a cup, smear it on a telescope lens and see an asteroid aiming carefully at a wet and glistening shell in the sand. |
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