I don’t remember what it was exactly,
but in any case, I tripped and fell.
Up,
Up,
Up into the sky.
Past mountains, past rivers.
Snowy peaks and apricate banks,
Clouds in their diaphanous ranks.
Past bats.
Airplanes; pale imitators, really.
Too large, too loud, and fettered
with logistics; yoked and condemned
To straight-line paths by straight-line men with straight-
Line minds. That's the bare and bluntest bit of it for
You. Theirs is a world in working order: efficient,
Effective, exploitable. Theirs are estimable T(hree-)
L(etter) T(itle)s; theirs are lives of
Handshakes and boardrooms and sign-
On-this-line-pleases.
And theirs, bought and sold, are these parodic steel volantēs.
Modern marvels, to be sure. But the bat breathes breadth.
And breadth there is in this world, this
One, brutish and free; jarfuls
Of the stuff. Look around: you
Know the spot. And the desert
Will swallow your cries,
And the ocean your tears,
And the sky,
The sky in that moment seemed big enough to hold anything anyone could ever feel,
And the sky,
That was for everyone.
And these things pass, and the airplane passed.
The grass felt short and stubby beneath my fingertips.
Manicured to perfection.
It had been me who last cut it.
The grass beneath my fingers attached to my hands going up to my arms into my body somewhere out in the rest, all of it small, all of it small.
I don’t remember what it was exactly,
But in any case, I tripped and fell.
Up,
Up,
Up into the sky.
Someone called my name. Again. I didn’t care.
Someday the world would start in on me again. It always did, each day being twenty-four long hours; an hour being sixty minutes; one sweep of a lonely planet round a lonelier star being three-hundred sixty-five-plus-one-quarter-of-a-day, more or less.
But the sky, that was for everyone.
And tonight it was for me and the bats.
Originally written August 20, 2021; revised August 2023