Against Flight

Everyone wants to go up - but no one can imagine
what it's like when the earth smooths out, begins

to curve into its own implacable symbol.
Once you've adjusted to chilled footsoles,

what to do with your hands? Can so much wind
be comfortable? No sense

looking around when you can see
everywhere: There'll be no more cloulds

worth reshaping into daydreams, no more
daybreaks to make you feel larger than life;

no eagle envy or fidgeting for a better view
from the eighteenth row in the theater...

no more theatre, for that matter, and no
concerts, no opera or ballet. There'll be

no distractions except birds,
who never look you straight in the face,

and at the lower altitudes,
monarch butterflies - brilliant genetic engines

churning toward resurrection in a foreign land.
Who needs it? Each evening finds you

whipped to fringes, obliged to lie down
in a world of strangers, beyond perdition or pity -

bare to the stars, buoyant in the sweet sink of earth.

What the eye sees is a dream of sight
what it wakes to
is a dream of sight

and in the dream
for every real lock
there is only one real key
and it’s some other dream
now invisible

it’s the key to the one real door
it opens the the water and the sky both at once
it’s already in the downward river
with my hand on it
my real hand

and I am saying to the hand
turn

open the river

To the hand