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SECOND PLACE
I Climbed Up On It
By James Saint-Cloud
San Rafael, California
It flutters down beside me, on the grass,
a white-tailed headless wing that shimmers orange.
Like me.
Smelling faintly of the bones of trees,
tails of cotton woven thin and long, the seeped
dark blood of ground, made pliable. So I climb onto
it.
Then movement! Up! More wind than I have ever known.
The orange crinkling skin blown tight like sails, concave,
a bowl I hold so tight to me with all my toes, adrift
on airy swells like gulls atop the ocean’s waves
that roar and froth to throw them to their wings.
Then plummeting! Toward sudden pointy woods that hurry
up so soon, so close, as I brace for an impact that
must surely –
But the breeze comes soothing up in time, reaching
out
to hold the clouds inside its hands, where the sun
goes breaking shadows up along the sea.
All the world goes twisting from a thread,
and the sun explodes to sparks inside my head.
My dots begin to be dislodged, blown off,
three, another, four, planted down the furrows of the
sky.
The mirror of the day grows wider than I’ve ever
known.
And me a ball of rain so disinclined to lose its smallness
in the ocean depth. Enough!
I yearn to climb again through stalwart sighing jungles
of the lawn,
to glimpse the flicker-show of light and shadow
through the trees while seasons dance to Earth’s
drummed pulse,
connected to the cataract of solstice into equinox—
No more than that. Myself Nature’s wondrous centerpiece,
and all Nature a string wound up around the world.
Then suddenly a bounce, as when the dawn encounters
sleep,
and all is calm and green again. There is a finger
being offered me, “Look, a ladybug!” And
I am free,
wondering at this wild dream of flight I’ve had.
No longer feeling tiny as the rain. More like the ocean
now.
Smallness the memory of a moment, and then quickly
flown.
Copyright (c) 2003 for
the author, all rights reserved. |
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