Robert Verdon, #130, Flight of Fancy

falling into understanding as the pieces come together they haul us out of this state as a rule but this time no one knows where I am I am flying past blank clouds that close-up are anaemic mist that hangs like tears over the yawning valley which bends like a fish-eye lens out of reach always out of reach

I am at the table in the fifties light

eating bacon and laverbread

and dreaming of Australia

and I am falling with the western empire into the ignominy and decay of the defeated soldier to whom success is counted sweetest

I must build a topless-tower cathedral in my heart and kick off the rotten bedclothes of the night

the Soviet hymns and the Little Birch Tree, as I fall past the tallest treetops and hear the gasp of bold children who dared to climb this far, who is it, is it Icarus, is it Lucifer, is it the Sign of the end-time, is it the Revolution or just a ’chute that did not open on May Day

my mother in the Arsenal as the others tossed detonators about like tennis balls, wouldn’t the Heinkels overhead have been surprised, a mushroom of black flame from the place they could not find, before they’d dropped a single bomb

my father over Africa and the Indian Ocean, held up by the engines he maintained, fishing for U-boats, not afraid of heights in those days, nobody was, per ardua ad astra

our war is yet to come, but come it will: it is not what the words mean but which is to be Master

and still I fall, I must be so close to the ground, I dare not look