A Taste for Falling | Judy Jordan
Maybe it was the cold pulling through darkness stippled on darkness,
washing the world loose so I walked untethered,
floating above the frost-traced stubble of corn
in the trembling light to the rock-ledge above water.
If there was a moon, it fell from my hands
into the wild flowers we call white tears,
fell through nights textured like dreams.
But there was no moon.
Only me hungry enough to peel bark from birch trees,
aware always of the river's slosh and drift,
aware always how the slightest movement
swallows you in cold's toothy grin.
Say I scaled the thin wind and joined the wild children of the woods,
learned the language of the orphaned dead,
got lost on the trail between worlds.
Say I forgot myself,
became a stutter of blue light
swirling in a river bottom's spiral,
my voice wet winter branches against a soot sky.
Say it's the fog of my breath that's wiped from windows,
my shadow sputtering at the screen.
It was not the objects but what linked me to them.
Not the passage from the side yard to post and wire,
past the cemetery, past the restless cows,
not the clumped thorn trees or catalpas chattering in wind,
but my mother's room, her perfume lingering,
years after her death.
Eyes lit like jack-o'-lanterns slid across the field and I disappeared.
Twisted into the sky's whirl,
I didn't sate my hunger on sweet gum and stripped pine,
never ate pitch and needles,
didn't survive but one slack-mouthed night
the broken wing inside me opened to the river,
since when I've known nothing except a dream gone black,
a taste for falling, from which I never wake.
washing the world loose so I walked untethered,
floating above the frost-traced stubble of corn
in the trembling light to the rock-ledge above water.
If there was a moon, it fell from my hands
into the wild flowers we call white tears,
fell through nights textured like dreams.
But there was no moon.
Only me hungry enough to peel bark from birch trees,
aware always of the river's slosh and drift,
aware always how the slightest movement
swallows you in cold's toothy grin.
Say I scaled the thin wind and joined the wild children of the woods,
learned the language of the orphaned dead,
got lost on the trail between worlds.
Say I forgot myself,
became a stutter of blue light
swirling in a river bottom's spiral,
my voice wet winter branches against a soot sky.
Say it's the fog of my breath that's wiped from windows,
my shadow sputtering at the screen.
It was not the objects but what linked me to them.
Not the passage from the side yard to post and wire,
past the cemetery, past the restless cows,
not the clumped thorn trees or catalpas chattering in wind,
but my mother's room, her perfume lingering,
years after her death.
Eyes lit like jack-o'-lanterns slid across the field and I disappeared.
Twisted into the sky's whirl,
I didn't sate my hunger on sweet gum and stripped pine,
never ate pitch and needles,
didn't survive but one slack-mouthed night
the broken wing inside me opened to the river,
since when I've known nothing except a dream gone black,
a taste for falling, from which I never wake.