When marriage went bad, she bailed out
to a new hobby, throwing herself
from a single-engine plane
to toll, bell-like, beneath a muslin
canopy, white as a wedding dress.
Gravity calls her toward routine,
but she can hang suspended for now
above terrain checkered as a mother's
comforter. She can look down
on roofs and steeples, see all
in clear, antiseptic light, so high
no children call. The lure of invisibility
is clean as the air, these miles
she's only seen from the weighted earth.
Dangling under silken lines,
in selfless abstraction, she treasures
each breath, each glimpse of bright,
uncluttered space, even as the world
reaches up, slips its knots around her ankles,
gently reclaims her.
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