To Try to Fall
I fell awake.
That mistake again!
All these holes to stumble into –
some of them the precise shape of the body –
you’d think they’d be easy to fall into,
lose yourself to the depths.
But what to do
when the hole won’t take you,
no matter how you shape yourself
to fit –
falling is free, isn’t it?
We are always falling.
In bodies falling toward bodies.
I used to try desperately
to fall in love.
I threw myself.
I never fell very far, I think,
but so often I thought something broke –
some fragile, essential, connective part.
The daily struggle to fall
imagines the catching arms
of the healer –
the dark in which he administers
his balm.
What fall is his season?
Which harbors the longest night?
I used to think you were beautiful
I used to think you were beautiful,
said the son to the moan
archly, his eyebrow cocked
over the orbit one opal
rotated through on its quest
to complete a true circuit
of vision, that goalless progress
toward the leer no barrier of scream
could shake or rattle, or, ultimately,
roll from a walk swept of leaf-shadow
and feather gust, a stride
certain as the tide that oysters
open for, chill and motherless,
the grit within lacquering toward
lusters never yet wiped
from the lingering eye’s wild
rise upon a heaven freckled already
with eternities a particle
leaps between, cuts through.