Flight:
A Memory
When I looked out my bedroom window
trees were on fire,
a flock of starlings blanketing
the sky, crying out in one vitriolic voice.
Boys and girls twirled like ribbons,
men with umbrellas
the shapes of shifting continents
swayed their hips to the sound
of a busker’s horn, hats held out,
filled with stripped copper wiring.
The ladder leaning below my bedroom
window encouraged fantasies
of running away, of circus days.
So heavy was the cloud of smoke
and ash on which I try to float
barely could I stand.
The notes and pauses I spent years
trying to fill in now position themselves
along the open score of my childhood.
And the trees bending in the nostalgic
wind
sound now as they did then, never having
abandoned their love for the raging fires.
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