Fly

by Bruce Bond

Flying dreams make strangers of our children.
Any bird will tell you.
If I swore they were true, who was I
to say otherwise.

If I survived
the cruelties of others,
and myself,
if gravity forgot me or forgave,
raised my bones
above the startled
flocks
and banners of my school,
it was not news.
It was a premonition.

First worlds are hostile.
We arrive the smallest citizen
in the room.
They cannot help it,
the towers of the voices
that make a body smaller.

Is that your mother who calls.
Is she the scale you remember,
your dad inside the lemon branches..
Is he cutting the stems of suns
that fall. When your father leaves,
do they keep on falling.

Do you wake an orphan and see
in every dread
the dark pleasure of being
alive:
in every dream, the garden
will not save you, name you,
but it sees you.
It watches over like a precipice,
a god,
an empty chair,

the eye of a bird in danger.