Come to earth safely, A.J. Bakunas;
descend, reborn in angelic slowness
your two hundred eighty eight feet in Kentucky.
You tried to leap from a higher height
than your rival the Guinness Book record holder
and broke the bag that cushions stunt falls.
"Look, Ma, no hands!" -- and then, straight through her.
When you return take female form,
grieving a while on the man you'd been,
the pride and the cost of a life as Bakunas...
understanding the boyish passions,
the dance on the edge in a solitude
that blinds; the need to prove, and to prove;
those stunning, ardent, fall-busted bones.
My only purpose this moment
is looking at a lizard.
Does he know he's not alone?
He breathes with tiny push-ups,
his skin all hairline caverns
soaking up the sun.
I doubt, alive, I'm liable to get
closer to timelessness than this --
looking at a little lizard breathing.
You're angry at yourself for who you
(very funny) think you somehow
"are."
Arrives the Heroic Androgyne,
elegant woman-man, beauty
musculate as if by Da Vinci,
generous and strong, speech
ranging through all of the spectrum, mind
pacific in its spaciousness,
unkinked from terror, a total person,
turning up, now at last, everywhere.
In a mad-girl dance our locust sapling
flails in storm, but we'd declare it
conscious, free, its chaos-rhythms
tolling the mindless bells of the wind.
Tomorrow we'll see it, motionless, calm,
like a poised adolescent on point on five toes.
It's true mere fancies can't keep us unbroken,
but as we imagine compassion arises
through recognitions which outfox mourning:
how dogs by the sea are so joyful they're teachers;
some people so strong they risk being kind.
We are the tides...and their witnesses.
We are a voice impelled to tell
where the joining of sound and silence is,
silence that rests in the cave of the drum.
The whole display -- its flowers, its glory --
is what we hold dear interest in.
That and saying our say...and beginning again.