Remember when we shot our breaths
out of ourselves, laughing
at the last loud fart? We couldn’t stop
And we sprayed gasping iridescent drops
into the air like water from the spray
nozzle of a garden hose, just for dancing.
We played chase like being hunted was a game,
like capture was a cartoon scene, we fell down
laughing. Wait, we said, I need to catch ––
like it was slow feathers falling from the sky
to be cupped in our open hands
––And remember, how we painted with it, too?
We blew our canvasses across car windows,
fingertips tracing: here a smile, now a cat,
heart.
And sometimes it was smacked from us, as when we
fell back off a ladder or a swing, but the trick
to waiting was knowing the metaphor and trusting
that if the next breath could be knocked out
like a ball from a basket, it could also come
swishing back at the next run up the court,
catching nothing but the nets of our wide-stretched
throats.
We didn’t think about squandering, then,
and it never once occurred to us to save
any of what we spent so freely, those fortunes
that we took for our inheritance. We had no way
of knowing, then, how easily they could go. Really,
it takes only a certain amount of pressure,
applied across a certain length of time,
but how could we have begun to measure
what we had yet to grow the strength
to apply?
We couldn’t, not when
time was what we flew threw,
roaring our laughs
like lions
until they ran out.
