The Short Walk
        Often, however, was there a question present tome. Should someone now, at the
        turning of that corner, blow me out of Space, in the other World, or other No-Work
        by pistol-shot-how were it?
                -THOMAS CARLYLE, Sartor Resartus

As you lug your groceries and books
across the spine of the Burlington Street bridge
and the creek that floods each spring,
the traffic's exhalations bump your shirt and breath.
On a June day in the unbuttoned heat of noon,
the buses and cars come close.

A step into their path
will lift you out of this life.
Picture it: replaced by wind,
you rise, passing through power lines,
formless, calm,
your husk of a body
crushed near a puddle of milk,
the white leaves of a novel
swirling on the stream's surface below.

And then the cars rise,
grey, green, blue.
Black, pink, and yellow wires,
PVC and copper pipes
hang and flap and drip mud and clay,
the torn roots of a dry cleaners,
a convenience store,
as each floats off its moorings
and into the sky.
The cottonwoods pop and snap as they loosen,
gas lines hiss and splutter,
whole neighborhoods rise in flocks,
and even the sewers, like bass surfacing,
heave up through streets and alleys
and float from sight....

You lead this groaning parade
into the nauseating candor of space,
forgetting you are a dream that is,
with each waking yawn,
more imperfectly recalled.

Copyright © 2009 Rich Levy All rights reserved
from Why Me?
Mutabilis Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission