where I’m going, the bright houses
far from corrupted air.
Nowhere you’d risk – everywhere.
The difference is death,
or maybe it’s just
useless instruction.
We love the dead, discredit the living.
“The dead.” What is that?
I’m a bare bringer of death,
my own widow.
Who sends me cards? Letters?
Home news, gone.
Time pretends it’s gravity,
always pulling down –
but it’s a breeze, too.
Riding the updraft, grabbing air,
that’s what air is for.
For example, there is not nothing, now.
I think your arms are where I might go
if I were not always sailing upwards
into bluer air,
each cloud a station
looking down on the tiny globe.
And that’s a comfort. To know that everything falls
and is gone
with less than the speed of light.
Words become worlds.
I’ll speak before I leap, look before I sleep.
-- Patricia Carlin
Patricia Carlin's books include Second Nature, QUANTUM JITTERS and ORIGINAL GREEN all from Marsh Hawk Press. She has published widely in journals and anthologies such as Boulevard, BOMB, Verse, American Letters & Commentary, Pleiades, POOL, The Literary Review, The Manhattan Review, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency; and she has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and VCCA. She teaches literature and poetry writing at The New School, and she co-edits the poetry journal Barrow Street.
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