It cheered him up to learn that swifts stayed
Most of their lives, ten months at a time, in the air.
He didn't have enough love to write fifteen drafts of losses
Suspended in eye-blue air, trying to raise art from despair.
His life had been more of a rusted canoe wobbling on pond chop
Than a sculpted arabesque of cloud-high devotion landing only to nest.
Nevertheless, he savored the notion of flight unsupported
By regular rest, given how only the air itself had given him
Much understanding or hope of understanding things.
The ideas he'd met had rarely been from bodies when he met them.
Were it not for books, engines, machines, devices with tuners, with screens,
He might have never gotten to know much of anyone or anything.
Now, he thought, "if I haven't seen as much, touched as much,
Been told by anyone elevated how well I elevated them--
If I've had less to lose on the one hand for having had to need a hand
Now and then, then, on the other hand, I could still dream upwards and sink
Down toward blank heaven's reflections with the best of them."
He knew it made no sense to think like this, but what sort of effort-full thing
Hangs suspended, spinning and sleeping and thinking while rowing its wings?
Apparently a small and selfishly falling, difficult-to-notice thing.
As he neared a stone home on the shore, no one home except air,
He could feel himself sinking and lurched, tipping over and over again.
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