Bungee Jumping
Aunt Mildred tied up her petticoats with binder’s
twine, and my great-uncle Ezekiel waxed and waxed
his moustaches into flexibility. It was the whole
family off then into the dangerous continent of air
and while the salesman with the one gold eyetooth told us
the cords at our ankles were guaranteed to stretch
to their utmost and then bring us safely back
to the fried chicken and scalloped potatoes of Sunday dinner
nobody quite believed. Edwina, my father’s half sister
by my grandfather’s marriage to a former dance hall girl,
who got her doctorate in tensor evaluation, she said
whole galaxies have been known to belch and disappear
taking with them the King Charles spaniels and the gold-
plated fire hydrants from where the fire finally stopped
in the earthquake year. But it was no good growing
roots into the vegetable garden, not after the Monarch
butterflies flew up into one whirling vortex and blanked
out of immediate space, it was no good
hoping Ken and Barbie, sexless, would anchor us
to our interchangeable faces, or that our feet
those flat independent anemones, could grip forever.
The salesman smiled, with his face the size
of the Empire State and growing bigger and bigger
and into and through the face Aunt Mildred went
shouting “Banzai!” into Great-Uncle Ezekiel’s
inherited ear trumpet, shredding it to tin ribbons,
and Edwina, dressed in the full commencement robes
of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and
Mother and Father wrapped in each other’s
reminiscences, and the goldfish, and finally I went
too, out of the mold my body had been formed in
and inhabited, as if place were the only realization of person
and either the cords snapped, as any sceptic might have expected,
or they are stretched out finer than a human hair,
that keeps growing after death, even in the black melting
that may or may not be the tight coral beach beyond.
Copyright Credit: William Dickey, “Bungee Jumping” from The Education of Desire. Copyright © 1996 by the Estate of William Dickey. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press, >www.wesleyan.edu/wespress.
Source: The Education of Desire (Wesleyan University Press, 1996)