When I was two, I could count to seventeen.

I found seventeen of everything: fingers,

freight cars, books to be read at bedtime.



The fly my father freed from an empty pop bottle

had seventeen wings, and each of us



was seventeen years old. For dinner,

seventeen avocados. Everything

I couldn't imagine was seventeen miles away.

What's surprising



is how I learn

and re-learn a place,

wander the far reaches, my soul

on kite string, my body

the taught finger. Today, perhaps



out of sight, a truck or a plane

ascends the horizon. We have a back that must bend

for us to bow or touch the Earth,



and if bending were easy, bowing would be

something else again, something like holding your breath

and counting to seventeen. The day

lays shattered into splinters of light, and what the crows

cannot gather dusk arrives to smother.



We watch as if watching could save us,

but we ought to fear being a witness. We ought to know

what a witness must do. You told me



think of my slender hands

for catching, of how hard

my wrists will work to break your fall.



Don't think of being born into flight.



Think, if you can, of grace

and hunger

as the arc of falling



not from but into.



Standing at the window in the arms

of my father, and now you, we watch the stars

and then the streetlights

toggle off, the day not here,



but coming—the coin

in midflip, the foul ball arcing

out of play and then in. Me

leaning into him, and you, completely.

I know the day will come

when I will think of this and wonder

whose hands you meant to catch me,

whose hands dropped me to begin with.



The day comes when I see the northern lights

and know to close my eyes, the better to hear them.

The day comes when my only sin

is distinguishing when a thing breaks

inside us, but not in half, not cleanly—



One day, probably a Tuesday,

this thing we call

rising



will uncoil inside you



and it's then

you'll rediscover your hands

one over each wing



and let go.