as I prepared for a poetry reading,
As I stepped over the lintel, I heard the news…
The sky stopped, my hand froze on the doorknob.
I was halfway between worlds,
a liminal portal, a threshold. A day where
we could never go back to who or where we were.
Our days were spent in speechless horror
as we watched one atrocity after another unfold
again and again on phosphor screens the world over.
The images, indelibly etched on our retinas,
of people falling falling from the sky, afire,
an image I would revisit again in my mind’s eye.
Strangers holding hands as they fell that morning.
All that blue sky above them like a flawless quilt.
The thick dust settling like a blanket over them.
My heart in my throat, the vertigo that followed.
I was never so afraid of heights
until that moment frozen in time.
2. To this day I cannot shake the image
of those random couples falling from the sky,
holding hands, as they plummeted from great heights,
as there was nowhere else left for them to go.
So they plummeted like birds of prey
toward the solace of the ground.
Sometimes I imagine
that we have wings inside our bodies,
held prisoner by a cage of ribs and viscera.
Late afternoon we visited a woman
in the Berkeley Hills who was at Ground Zero.
The afternoon light flooded the room
and the piano keys glistened and smiled,
a melody that fell silent so many years ago.
Later, I heard how she had died,
having inhaled too much death that day.
It came back to claim her.
Those interior wings of desire.
3. Sometimes when I am at great heights,
I imagine wings transporting me
across a great chasm, like that thin landbridge
on the crest between Mount Whitney and King’s Canyon.
I peered down into forever, watched carrion birds
circling the updraft with wingspans taller than me,
the feathers of my inner wings
tickling the back of my throat until I coughed
and spluttered, gasping for breath,
those wings that kept me aloft.
4. The sisters separated us in church
to keep us from disrupting the mass,
saying that we needed to leave enough room
for our personal guardian angels.
I thought it grandiose but I became obsessed
with the spaces between us, not knowing
which side s/he sat on, and did that mean
we needed to leave enough room
for two angels to sit side by side? Were they hes or shes?
Suddenly the sparsely populated pew seemed overcrowded.
Parishioners glared at us for taking up so much space.
And then I began to worry about how much room
they needed for their wings and could they even sit?
Could their wings even be folded back to fit the pew?
Or were they relegated to a life of standing around
watching snotnosed brats rather than soaring the skies
or taking up dancing on the heads of pins?
5. How far have I fallen? The mighty Mo,
having tumbled from great heights, she,
having dangled her legs from great precipices,
contemplates the fall from youth into old age.
The time my horse took the bit in her teeth
as we barreled up the fire road, her head in my lap,
flecks of saliva, foam and blood covering me
as the bit cut deep into her tongue.
My penance, to cleanse the stickers from her tongue
cauterizing it was silver nitrate.
The cost of speed, asking a racehorse to run,
not being able to control her, the blood lust was up
and the adrenaline pummeled her heart
so she felt no pain that day and the wind had wings
but the crash landing brought us back to earth.
The overwhelming guilt and grief.
6. The mezzanine is a midway place between below and above.
A kind of purgatory of our own choosing.
7. We had climbed an old oak overhanging the creek,
my aunt walked out the mossy limb.
I stood to follow, but I was four and lost my footing.
The rocks in the gorge below gnashed their teeth.
She grabbed me by the arms, hauled me over the rough bark
like a sack of potatoes to the safety of the branch.
My armpits were bleeding. My granny treated my wounds
with zinc oxide and the cats were terribly interested.
Afterwards, at Speck’s Bar, a stranger tried to pick me up
to raise me up to his eye level, but I screamed and screamed.
The man startled, dropped me, until my aunt explained.
The Shirley Temples used to assuage my pain
were as crimson as blood of Christ.
Where was my guardian angel that day when I needed her?
Was she more earthbound, or did she merely abandon me?
And what about my aunt saving me from the rocks below?
3/30/22 Write On! workshop with Terri Glass
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