Stepping Off

Stepping Off

Despite these attractions, the island is deserted,

and the tiny footmarks seen along the shores

all point towards the sea.

                                                                Wislawa Szymborska

                                                                Utopia 

It was friendship we were getting at

how those among us make it

as though it was the very stair

we stood on to keep us

from falling into the gorge.  There are times

we step off and just like that, it's a

Wiley Coyote moment and we are shocked

at the vertigo that comes 

quiet naturally, by whatever force

it is that balls up

gravity and shoves it

into the hole in our spine all the way through

to the bottom

of our voice box, that place

were sound is made and stoked

starting like the laying down

on a cold firestone all the dry devices

we could find in our daily lives.  And lighting it’s
the only thing left to do.  Maybe we turn

to grope for the stair

and strike the match instead and we let go

and fall up with the fire and

the specks of tinder and that

only when the flame’s taken

our socks and shoes and licked them

with their spikey wild tiger tongue

lifting the skin back to open our whole

closed world to a shade of red

we’d always carried inside our purse

of skin but never opened, not that way, not even

cutting not even with surgery or a burn

falling into all that pressure of space

it’s like that it truly is right? and all that time

spent building the stair and maybe

another one and another one and some

may choose ladders and some may choose

rope and listen it doesn’t really matter,

does it? in the end because there’s that

moment we are nothing and even

in between that moment, before we know

we’re falling, just as we’ve stepped off

                                                                (or been shoved)

everything that’s solid we are, and we are completely

blank with its bliss, like the moment we’re

born, thoughtless as rocks tossed one by one

by one over the shoulder of the first

responder rushing to

the cave-in at the shaft we’d fallen

into, the mosaic they’re making with all that

tossing ignored and why

shouldn’t it be, because the real job’s at the mouth

then starting down, in the entry-way of the mine

or the boat that’s just sunk on her starboard

side, wheelhouse against the struck ledge,

what dislodged the stair but who could’ve seen it

climbing like we do, each stair we’ve ever made.