Excerpt: Rodeo Song

I see a clear blue sky – robin’s egg blue with only one lonely gathering of clouds in it. I see clouds and light. I see the com trail of a jet that has just flown by and I hear the train whistle blowing, the four fifteen, on its way to somewhere else, somewhere away, far away, blowing because it always blows at this time. I feel something catch me from inside my gut and start to reel me in and down, invisibly, insensibly as I start to plummet down and I recognize that I’m falling because I am that far up. I’m dropping with the certainty of a stone dropped from high above, from an outstretched arm at the end of a cottage dock into the stillness of a country lake, dropping straight down with nothing attached to it, but I realize that it’s not a stone but it’s me – it’s me that’s falling and I thank whoever made this happen, me or God or whoever else that I’m not facing down. My arms are outstretched like a cartoon sleepwalker, my legs bent like I’m in a reclining chair, my hands pulled up as my body drops back and down and away into a backwards that is out of my range of vision. I feel the ground drawing me like iron shavings to a magnet and that all of this is going to end very soon and very quickly. I hear someone laughing and crying and begging for forgiveness and I don’t know if it’s me. Is it me? I don’t want to think about any of that – I just want to watch the sky. If I’m going to fall, I'll keep watching the sky because I can’t stop the fall and when it stops, the stop is going to be what’s on my mind if anything is at all.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------