This crushing craft

Inevitable shadows.
This crushing craft of being

a parent without parents.
Falling from a tree

As a nine year old.
Mapping the light as it spirals

Out of my dizzy eyes. Rattled
By reality’s gravity. Then the light

Gathered into the sun,
The swimming shadows into leaves.

The earth slowed down until
I could stand again. Now the sense

Is more of a sliding away decade,
Wonder with a sideshow of work.

*

In the south one day by a public library
An elephant’s trunk reached out for me

Through the temporary circus fencing
And I reached back. The vine of muscle

Coiled almost to my shoulder and held.
For a full minute we stood there

In a terrible freedom, neither of us letting
Go as everything else spun into shadow.