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after Chuang Tzu and Cyrus Cassells
It’s true I drowned at six.
True when I was twenty
we lifted above the city
as the sky filled with spy satellites.
No one believed our balloon
could still be afloat
when the moon rose and made of the sea
a threshing floor. But above it we glowed
as our burners flared.
We breathed from our heels
in the dear air,
our fingertips kissed from blue to pink.
*
Boy that I am I rush into water over my head
to rescue the beach ball
drifting deeper on the tide.
All purpose, scampering over the surface
like a water strider,
I’m closing in on the ball
when I hear the others calling,
fear in their voices
that the boy cannot swim,
and I begin the thrash of drowning.
*
Beneath us the City of Romance
kept shrinking, became obscured by clouds,
each hint as thin as a cicada wing,
but piled as dense as cicada song.
The masses below breathed from their throats
as the sky bristled with hardware.
Who can tell whether stars
or our fears
punctured our promises?
Hard earth rushed toward our heels.
Falling fast and faster, I recalled
the rescue,
*
fighting the water, strong arms
that brought me back to land,
vomiting brine onto sand.
*
Slammed into a slope in the Andes.
I woke to the sound of a gimlet
prying open my jaw
to extract the silver of my years.
Abandoned again, my blood dried
into flakes of iron
scattered in mountain wind.
*
It’s true that I revived
in the unburial
of the sacrificial Incan boy
and his twin sister
mummified at the summit.
King and Queen for a year
before their ritual murder,
exhumed to travel
in coffins of dry ice
to museum immortality.
*
I swim over canyons, condors
for kin, my sibling in love
a wingtip away.
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