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Towards Reality
Caught in my own particular pettiness
I decline people nearest to me for the
sorrow of a Darfur bird. The insistent
substance laden wish list of the heart,
inscribed with hieroglyphs I first saw
in Canyon De Chelly, a boy standing
in sand, looking at the origin of Hitler's
co-opted symbol, pointing in the four
directions. This is not about history,
this is about expansiveness and the
start of restriction, the place between
gratitude and fuck off. This is about
the constant emu egg rolling in my
chest, the crack in the cheap cartoon
mask I hang by the door, and the night-
mares I keep having of her in labor-
my first child asphyxiating in his own
mother's fluid, and his mother with
a broken back. No hagiography can
save me. No learning. Keats' desperate
falling through unknowing did know
that knowledge is illusion, that the
scar on the back of my hand itched
will fester, bleed, but still heal and I
will care about it as little as anyone else.
Balsa Wings
I'm not prone to rapture.
Nor the faith it takes
to risk elevations.
Icraus was an idiot.
My father built balsa
wings, gluing pieces
into long structures
to loop around fields.
He tried to teach me
the art of small planes.
I never finished anything
but the wings.
It is easy to subscribe
to idiocy. I want to
believe failure is rising
a brief second where
the world becomes
miniature and mountains
interchangeable. But
wax wings melt. Icarus
flies at the sun. I fly
at my father. The spin
is where falling begins.
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