I did not see her in flight or morning.

I did not stand her harps or trumpets.

or anything in my getting up day.

I traded the dreams we made on the ground

for my dream to be a god in the sky

(It was a guilded Gethsemane).

Hell is immortality without a net.

Immortality is a moon that never sets

after a million Sunday suns.  
What was more important in the clouds

to my zest for joy unseen?

What unseen lord lineated my wings

and made them more important than our broom?

What made them more important than our leaps

Through earth bound walls and beams?

What — in the light — was far more desirable

than the beads of sweat in our dreams?
Once we salved our scars on the ground.

Fields bent around the space we tided

and stole away from lashes and bounders.

Once we stilled the weevil in stole away hours

and made nothing more important than our clay.

Once we spun and made a world

                    and then I flew away. 
Why, boy, why should she have not kept moving?

My funeral band should have been dusted.

My procession was better off bare and emptied

in a taxonomy of heartbreak and loss;

a mourners’ row of upturned plots

for living graves of swords and shields.

Hope brought her no feathers in ruby red fields

and memory gave her no balms.

Why should she mourn me in the memory of flight

when my rails meant more than her arms?