Winged Purposes

Fly from me does all I would have stay,   

the blossoms did not stay, stayed not the frost   

in the yellow grass. Every leash snapped,   

every contract void, and flying in the crows   

lingers but a moment in the graveyard oaks   

yet inside me it never stops so I can’t tell   

who is chasing, who chased, I can sleep   

into afternoon and still wake soaring.   

So out come the bats, down spiral swifts   

into the chimneys, Hey, I’m real, say the dream-   

figments then are gone like breath-prints   

on a window, handwriting in snow. Whatever   

I hold however flies apart, the children skip   

into the park come out middle-aged   

with children of their own. Your laugh   

over the phone, will it ever answer me again?   

Too much flying, photons perforating us,   

voices hurtling into outer space, Whitman   

out past Neptune, Dickinson retreating   

yet getting brighter. Remember running   

barefoot across hot sand into the sea’s   

hovering, remember my hand as we darted   

against the holiday Broadway throng,   

catching your train just as it was leaving?   

Hey, it’s real, your face like a comet,   

horses coming from the field for morning   

oats, insects hitting a screen, the message   

nearly impossible to read, obscured by light   

because carried by Mercury: I love you,   

I’m coming. Sure, what fluttered is now gone,   

maybe a smudge left, maybe a delicate under-   

feather only then that too, yes, rained away.   

And when the flying is flown and the heart’s   

a useless sliver in a glacier and the gown   

hangs still as meat in a locker and eyesight

is dashed-down glass and the mouth rust-   

stoppered, will some twinge still pass between us,   

still some fledgling pledge?