hold yourself heavy on the windowsill dear
I once heard a tale of a girl who learned to fly:
she learned through books how to build;
the mechanics of wings and winged things
and she built them herself out of
burnished wood, the floorboards of her room,
and ash, and wax that dripped
from the candle like rain,
and she watched the swallows
rippling in distortions across the sky,
and she thought it beautiful - so she jumped
one day, she took herself to the hills
in a taxi and she jumped from them like a bird, and
they talked to the taxi man after, quite seriously,
about what they called 'the incident',
and her parents too, and the people called her friends:
now how is it that a girl can learn to fly
and nobody can notice, not even a bit,
and what oddities and obscenities made her do it,
and moreover, what was she thinking that spring morning
when with one full stroke she threw herself from the hills
into the air and disappeared like dust
into a swallow, a black speck cartwheeling across
the horizon?
