While I'm Flying

The earth is endless dirt
hung like burrs on the sun’s hide,
but quick in vast air bubble,
orb massing ocean out of orbit
and informing chlorophyll –
we each breathe our brevity
by green plumping blue.

Our ancestors forge one line
straight through the cargo door.
my feet step out
and I’m an element unloosed.

At silent heights, things approach:
tidbit of salt;
nectar from light clear to clover;
dew off a buckling black drogue ‘chute
seems to loop, then pirouette on.

Aground, a tug from the soil.
Fire in its eloquent grass under snow
clouds water out of coiled wood –
they are the sun, darkness inside-out,
like the trees are blood from bone.

The commotion in my sleeves
points me belly-down
and within that,
rock heft temerity is primed
for the ogling hole of the mind,

how there is the sigh,
how the whoosh, of its flannel patches,
cranium its delight:
I plunge through jaggedly-sewn me
gripping gravity.

An exhalation is lapping stars
clean again, a rhythm like
a child with a mixing bowl,
beating the seas senseless.