Day Four: After Falling

Day Four:

After Falling

Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours

            for thee?  For thee does she undo herself?

                                                The Revenber’s Tragedy

And didn’t part of me want to stay

right where I was, even though the angle,

completely off, sloped and graded

completely away from cloud gazing.  Besides,

I’d’ve slown the traffic, still hours asleep,

the mindless go and come (which I bet

is why I fell to begin with, I was mind

less, I was already in the basement

doing laundry, I was already

in the kitchen pouring coffee—I was

everywhere but the stairs where I absolutely

was there was no question)

and while staying there wasn’t 

an option

(I wanted to—for anything it meant a rest)

I did, before I found a place to hold

            (all those mental checks against what’s possibly

            gone)

close my eyes and float up and nudge my ceiling

of skin and float there a bit and then,

as though a whole crowd had gathered

and I had something to prove

I quite simply rose and finished

my walk down the rest of the half

dozen without a bow to it at all

and carried on, shhhhing the girl

in myself who’d curled and gone fetal

coaxing her with the you’re fine freedom

of finally standing and walking 

off into whatever it was I was going off into.