Liquid Slow Motion

This time last year, I decided to join my friends, in winter’s sleep, waiting for my skin to flake and escape my hot cadaver, into the chill breezes of fall’s oncoming vortex.

In a dry and sudden rush, I realized it was nothing more than the apparition of a child, lost in the subsonic rumble of turbulence under the wing of a DC-9, which carried me now into a controlled free-fall, the length and breadth of my memory.

Frozen in the aircraft window, my dreams superimpose the flashing soundless lights, where yesterday’s meandering wind outlines a penniless child dreaming outrageous adventure. I see him thrashing there, through all those ochre leaves smeared with blood from his long hot wounds. 

I hold my knees in the crash position, which I assume upon landing, every landing…for every fall to earth carries with it a promise of sacrifice and ritual rebirth.

The stillness inhales as the huge plane skids into its inhuman drag, as blasting engines reverse the molecules of air in space…and in my chest.

I swallow the coldness of my personal fall, my isolation, and the pain I’ve given innocence, my own, and the gray eyes which looked to me for promise, and redemption.

The landing gear locks and the titanium beast slows to a crawl, my own walls have sealed in preparation for winter’s deep and hard paralysis.

Spring is somewhere within me.

I can almost feel her wings unfolding, in liquid slow motion; yet she is silent as myth, and I have lost, the final memory of myself, both then, and now…

copyright 2010 Soccolich, all rights reserved