David Krump

animals falling

It's not the tremulous fear.
It's the motion of Atlantis, gravity, and
how they just gave themselves down to the earth,
into discordant consecutive fifths, leitmotiv
galaxies sucked down through invisible vertical
vacuums along immense luminary chess pieces,
falling with rudimentary animus, its soft balance
evident in a new gospel: what angel this is
that falls and falls?

Floor after floor: down to the sky.
Still, no footing. A slight adjustment of the limbs,
then faster: beyond window, vision of tricycle, an old
penny,
eggnog sun so close we might've thought foolish
Icarus had led a small platoon of tragically
inventive slaves too near the sun, or that
in all of nature, the size of the wing
determines the duration of the flight.

Now, we make an angry love, imagine
new white gold model cities. We raze them again:
Zion, Babylon, Camelot, and Avalon.

But then there's this other story about a shy princess
transforming every night into a black dragon with
glass talons.
So fragile are the talons that the dragon can never
land, all night it flaps its fleshy leather wings
before
the floppy blue moon. Every morning too exhausted
to dress, the princess sleeps. The day cardiacs into
night.
Coda.

One night mid flight the dragon falls asleep. Falls.
In the village streets below, a splash of glass,
flame from the corpse. A new breed of peasant
in the strata we greet only ourselves, fifty thousand
volumes of hush.