When it seems we are beyond hope, I hope
instead for time. Even now, spring unsheathes
a billion blades, as I sprint round the lakes
of treated wastewater. Signs with red slashes warn me
to avoid contact and the scent of sewage is barley suppressed
by radish flowers and hard wind, yet all these birds
feel safe. This, their kitchen and cradle. Hospice
gave my friend’s mother five to ten days. She’d been dying
slow at home for months. For ten afternoons she shook
her head when we met at the afterschool pickup.
Day eleven, she sighed with exhausted awe, day twelve,
day eighteen. When the virus closed the school
it was day twenty-one. Now she seems to hover
in some sunlit room within me as I run, beyond
the climbing death toll. Wind-whipped, I break
my record. Pant against my mask. From this
shit-bleached path, I see no contagion spreading
beneath the doubled swan, the mallards rippling
sepia sky. A red-tailed hawk hangs
motionless above me. I blink and miss
its dive. Just to know what it was like, I jumped
from an airplane once. From high enough,
it doesn’t feel like falling, more like being caught
in the blast of an enormous fan. Like being lifted
despite the lakes and fields, rushing
into painstaking detail. My friend’s mother shared
her rations with a Jewish boy, hidden in her childhood
home just long enough to save him.
So her body must remember how to live
on less, the hospice nurse told my friend.
How many springs do we have left?
The shocked trees scatter their confetti
all at once and too early. Still, I want this
reclaimed green, for my children,
and theirs, and theirs. Just to die
in our own time, beneath at least
twenty-one forehead kissed goodbyes.
By now she must be gone, but I hold on,
let her hold me still, to grieve in freeze-frame
this exponential losing. For a while
and from high enough. But so much goes unsaved
as the seasons pick up speed. How many laps?
How many gone? How many?
My friend’s dead mother soothes me.
I dress her up in ether, let her sleep
in peace. Is there a difference
between free fall and flight?
I want to say there isn’t.
I want to be forgiven
when I say that it’s okay. It’s not,
but we have a little time. So let’s pretend
this is what flying feels like.
There are whole lives that we can live
before the ground catches us.
