Falling
.
Falling's weightlessness is a troubled one
It's not like the airtime of up-drafting hawks
or homosapient gliders hung on wires under
silk billows out of their element
snubbing gravity putting on airs,
nor like the honking camaraderie
of southbound geese chasing solar flares
To know that speeding mass
in collusion with collision brings bereavement
in worlds of muscle blood and bone
is usually enough to keep most breathers
from dancing on edges or diving off ledges
By a wise prescience we understand
that freefall without orbit
must be a heavy weightlessness
no matter how long its freedom lasts
if gravity's die is cast
Bodies are more fragile than stone and steel.
In falling minds minutes are surreal
and time expands as down mind coasts
—as future shortens past grows richer
and now's edge is honed so fine
as to split the hairs of ghosts,
and life 's full-tipped to spill last hours out
which cling to sides of tissue pitchers
Past becomes a fuller world, more here,
which is why old fallers often go there more
than fresh fallers do, who, still green,
in exhilarated falling feel only wind in hair
the sheen of mornings crisp and new
being blessed to not fully grasp
that they are falling too
.
.
by Jim Culleny
10/28/13