Freefall
             
 It started as a lark that spring. A few
 of us piled into someone’s seen-better-days
 automobile and drove, without a clue,
 toward that tiny airport covered in haze.
  
 We were trying, I guess, to forestall all
 thought of the coming fall, who we would be
 without school. We practiced jumps, I recall,
 while a tiny plane circled, light and free,
  
 as things do when leaving. The month before—-
 it seemed an eternity—-my brother perished.
 An icy turn drove him through his dark door
 too early, while still raw and unfinished.
  
 Now, we were told to keep leaping off crates.
 Then it was time to climb into the craft,
 with glass altimeters strapped to our chests,
 to rise over fields, to plunge into updraft.
  
 For me, this was dull aftermath, mute ode
 to April, busy mixing her dead land
 hues—-memory, desire—-for me to decode,
 if I could, remake them with my own hand
  
 later, after we limped that night to the fire ring,
 shaken but standing, glasses and voices lifting.
  
 Leslie Schultz