“Freefall” for April 6, 2019

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
public domain photo by Guenther Dilligen (pixabay)