I sit on the bulge called ten stories tall
My eye flattens to a floor, a wall,
Like any bird on the nest anywhere
I live in a constant nothing of air
Some forty years up and ten stories high
A hundred inventions ahead of the sky,
With a ladder of ancestors holding me up
Whose rungs into history mystery drop,
But here I am where God’s feathers fly
Like the child in the rhyme in the sky so high.
Over the plumes of your thoughts I see
Your tired heart that rests beside a tree;
From the tenth platform of my tithe of time I
perceive you exhausted in your prime,
With heaven collaterally circling around
Your presence that holds the landscape down,
With birds disappearing in the sponge of leaves
And sundown painting your hopes like sheaves-
I speak into a tube for your distant ear,
You look up at me across the miles so clear.
Is it your look makes my room to descend
As though I were inside a shaft of the end?
The floorspace edges from under my feet
The breadth of a sword’s edge of monstrous speed;
I grasp for the desperate hold of a tear,
For the bend in space or the turn of the year,
But out of the thousands not the least star
Can keep me from falling too fast too far;
And suddenly there beneath your tree I lie
With you at the window ten stories so high.
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