How heavy I am. My feet sink into the ground and my knees are rubbery, my head and brain propped with aluminum braces. Life is short! I'm sinking through it at the speed of sound. A feather is dropping with me in the vacuum. At bottom we'll prove nothing except the fall is over for both of us. No matter that I am richer than Satanta the Kiowa chief if you subtract those millions of verdant acres which we did. In the prison hospital he hurls himself headfirst from the third-story window. Who wants to die like a white Christian? Even his animal skins forgave him. But this has nothing to do with me -- out the window I can't see the army approach with cocked howitzers. There's nothing but snow. How to lift myself out of this Egypt, wriggle free, fly out of the page, out of the human condition like a miraculous crow, like Satanta from the window, like birds beneath the buffalo feet, griffins to a nest at the cathedral's top. @3Fly, fly away@1 the old song goes, climb a single note and follow it, crazed mariachi, a shot tomcat, or Huxley near death from cancer drops ten thousand hits of acid to go out on a truly stupendous note, far above King David's zither, the shriek of our space probe hitting Venus plum in the middle. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...COMING DOWN TO THE DESERT AT LORDBURG, N.M. by HAYDEN CARRUTH YOU ARE FIRE EATERS by MARIANNE MOORE A SONG TO DAVID by CHRISTOPHER SMART MOONLIGHT IN SUMMER by ROBERT BLOOMFIELD HODGE by ROBERT SEYMOUR BRIDGES CLEVEDON VERSES: 6. PER OMNIA DEUS by THOMAS EDWARD BROWN THE KING'S GIFT by ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING THREE EPISTLES TO G. LLOYD ON A PASSAGE FROM HOMER'S ILIAD: 3 by JOHN BYROM |