Poem for Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Breach

You reach for something in the dark:

your hand, a delicate foreign object, slides through
the membrane of my dream.

It lands in a wheat field. I stand in front of this old
farm house. Red and white paint chips from the trim
rain down like confetti.

Your grandfather, whom I have never met, is there.
Real men, he says, break their backs. Real men
have thicker blood.

He begins to ascend. I look up at the sky. It is the
exact same color as the veins in the old man's neck.
I make the connection.

I start for the field then. I find your hand between the
golden stalks and begin to pull hard. The sun whispers
that it just killed Icarus.

It takes months to see your whole arm. It takes years
to see your eyes. But I stand, I pull, aging in the heat:

my back broken, my blood thickened
until I wake and after.