oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky-soaking foothills, papa,
to have your breath leave, escape you, escape the
weight of bone, muscle and organ, escape you, to rise up, to loft,
till you are all breath filling the room, rising, escaping the white, the white
sheets, airborne, taken in a gust of wind and unbridled ponies, let the ponies
out, I would open that gate if I could find it, if there was one
to let you go, to drift up into, out, out
of this experiment into the dome of all breath and wind and
reappear in the sound of the first year’s thunder with
Chigayow cutting the clouds over your eyes expanding, wafting, wings
of a bird over fields, fat ponies, spruce, birch and poplar, circling
wider than that tight square sanitized whiteness
you breathe in, if you could just stop breathing you could
escape, go anywhere, blow, tumble in the prairie grass,
bloom in the face of crocuses
appear in the smell of cedar dust off a saw
in the smell of thick leather
in the whistling sounds of the trees
in the far-off sound of a chainsaw or someone chopping wood
in the smooth curve of a felt hat, in unbridled ponies