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Freefall

A man with a telephone falls from the sky.  I fall

after him, all through the night above the bright

edge of the eastern seaboard and the black plane

 

of the Atlantic.  I see cloudbanks below lit orange

like some arid shore where ships make landfall

time zones away from me.  I look up the number

 

of the falling man on my list of recent calls as I free

fall through the still-clear dark.  He picks up

after three rings on my end, on his end maybe four. 

 

He begins with apologies for being on the other line

when I tried to contact him.  His voice still sounds

distracted as if half listening to that other voice

 

half speaking to that other ear neither of us can see.

Our conversation falls, as distracted ones fall

into territories unforeseen.  We speak for hours

 

on ancient themes that he knows better than I. 

Ashamed, I admit Pegasus makes me think

of Mobile Oil, of a red winged horse on a field

 

of white enamel, of seas sluggish with crude.

I admit I know Bellerophon only through one book

and then only because I had to read that book 

 

during my college years before other long years

journeying home.  He asks me, a bit too softly

under the force of night air rushing past

 

my unencumbered ear,  “Can you be content

on the course your life follows?”  After taking

a few moments to compose myself, a few moments

 

with both of us listening to static close in one ear

and the feathered sound of falling in the other

I reply, “Until you asked, I felt left behind by heroes

 

always off on their journeys.”  We hang there

suspended by data streaming between our ears

through a satellite’s block and tackle far above.  

 

At last, as if he is straining against some heavy

unexpected weight, he says

Matt Daly’s poetry appears in Clerestory, The Cortland Review, Pilgrimage, and elsewhere.  He is the author of Wild Nature and the Human Spirit: a Field Guide to Journal Writing in Nature and has published short fiction and essays in publications including: To Everything On Earth, Wyoming Fence Lines and Stories of the Wild.  In 2013, he received a creative writing fellowship in poetry from the Wyoming Arts Council.

Matt Daly

My Date with the Laureate

Took place at a little café on a pedestrian street someplace

other than Paris or Rome.  The Laureate wore trousers

 

that showed signs of wear around the knees as if from travel

the way blue in the sky fades a little toward the bright hole

 

of the sun.  We took turns ordering espressos and bottles

of mineral water, neither of us offering to pay for the other.  

 

We could have made the line move a little more quickly

if we had done this together but the black-haired woman

 

behind the counter appeared unbothered that we did not do so.

I ordered a bagel, which I thought must be an ugly word

 

in most languages.  I told the Laureate I was thinking this

about bagel but could not tell if he agreed or was just immune

 

to such pronouncements from men such as me.  A mustache

like his, I thought, hides subtleties in the way a man’s mouth

 

curves and I reconsidered growing my own.  I asked the woman

whom I should have thought of as a barista but did not, if she

 

had any plum preserves. Barista, to my ear, is an attractive

word.  Nothing on her face hid her annoyance as she dug

 

unsuccessfully, through the jam packets in their wicker basket

I could have just as easily dug through myself but did not.

 

Plum preserves would have tasted good while the Laureate

and I bantered, one topic then another.  We discussed

 

anatomical differences between ravens and crows, agreeing

the former are both more beautiful and more ominous

 

than the latter.  We agreed we were thankful to live around them

all the rough noises they make back in the depths of their ruffled

 

throats.  I felt obligated to speak of their cousin, the magpie. 

The Laureate seemed to humor me in thinking that my relationship

 

with the magpie was more complicated than with any other bird. 

The barista gathered cups from a table adjacent to ours

 

their even whiteness marred slightly by little rings of dried

milk foam.  We agreed that flocks of starlings, undulating

 

in wind-born formations, are beautiful even if the individual

birds are not.  Cups clinked together in their grey tub as the black-

 

haired barista moved away.  Date is not the best word for this

excursion.  The Laureate was not even there with me

 

in the bagel shop with my white cup of espresso, my two

glass bottles of sparkling water, one clear, the other blue.

 

Because the barista was no longer paying me any mind

I felt none of the usual hesitation in whispering to him

 

that sometimes I went to one of his books like a church,

some church with more than merely formal differences

 

from that first church I ever visited on that Boy Scout field trip

back when black birds were still  just something to shoot at

 

with a pellet gun, coffee something adults enjoyed in a way

I did not understand.  I whispered to him that sometimes

 

poems like his made me want to act less like some barrister

pushing my powdered locks off the collar of my black robes

 

shimmering under a morning sky not yet free of the deep

blue of dawn and night’s old rainclouds.  Each poem is a bird

 

he whispered, while outside some leaves flew into the air.

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