Falling

 I.
I remember the first time that my
father picked me up and walked me outside
into the warm dark summer night,
nature breathing soft and hazy on us
and he pointed up at the stars.
"D'you see those?" he asked softly,
as I wrapped my arms around his neck
and looked down his shadowy arm into the sky.
Little speckles of white in black, like looking through
the holes of my grandmother's crocheted blanket.
My world was as big as my father, and my mother,
and my preschool classroom. The stars
were my father's, apparently, and he'd put them up there
like he put the big trees in the ground
by the edge of our property, I had no doubt.
The shadowy figure of my father never left my sight
as I looked into the sky at his stars, and my world
got a little bigger, but only as far as the stars
my father reached up to show me. We wandered back inside
and he put me back to bed, to ponder the stars as I slept.

II.
I remember the first time that I
looked up into the sky on a clear dark night
and saw the stars for myself, and for the first time
my reference failed me and I started to fall into space,
the neverending openness between those specks
like little grains of sifted sand, and there was
nobody to pull me down and hold me fast.
I only fell but for a second before I
tore my chin back down below the treetops
and focused hard on the toolshed,
the dark outline of the nearby weeping willow
barely visible but concrete. My orientation restored,
I turned my head and shook all the way back into the house.

III.
I remember the first time that I
played out the scene, but the headfirst
drop into the sky was not absolved by merely
reclasping my zipline to my tiny world's frame
and tucking my head under the rafters hiding
like Adam, having sinned. I had taken one breath too long
with my vision fully detached from the appearance
of concrete coordinates, a free-walking astronaut
with my back to the Earth, gazing down into the infinite void
broken only by those gritty bits of falling sand,
plunging just one second too far from the ground.
I had seen that we were all falling, the world of us
hurtling down through space, falling endlessly,
falling, falling, and the best we could do
was to stand on the earth
as children stand upon a ball,
balancing delicately, naively
on what we choose to believe is steady.
None of us expects the fall.