Falling
At the
start of the falling, there was that floor-dropping-away,
stomach-to-the-mouth,
but after falling past immediate death
without
touching, past his body falling, reaching for each other . . .
sometimes
missing, glancing off
—sometimes holding on,
falling
a long way together as a four-armed beast, flailing,
or
quietly, slowly, watching friends falling over there, dishes,
the odd
ear of corn . . . finally they began to fall separately,
sometimes
not even reporting the cow on the train, the broken
shoe,
purple bruises, barely mentioning letters from home,
the
shaking hand, the way nothing works right when you're
falling. They got used to it. Falling was the new living,
and
they began, as people do, to believe there was nothing
waiting
for them, no bottom to this endless drifting down.
They began
to fall inside themselves in the darkness,
and
they knew what they had forgotten
but
there were no words falling past,
all the
words had fallen already,
and
they each fell away into themselves
and she
saw what he had always known,
that
they were separate beings,
that
she was a separate being,
that
she could decide—
the as-yet-unquantifiable
upside
of
being alone.
Growing
Up
Lakewood, Ohio
We
arose slowly from childhood's long green summer,
opening
like hesitant blossoms, uncertain of a friendly clime
and
during the deep snows of adolescent winter
froze
in place, waiting, hoping to go unseen by the pair
of
predators, hope and despair, by acne, singing the wrong
note,
blushing the hot misery of spot lights, that terrible
standing
apart and looking at oneself, no completely natural
act
ever possible, and weeping over the endless aloneness
of Lake
Erie's dreary shore.
My father floated along
like a
red balloon bobbing above, neither ascending nor
deflating,
held to an even height by a short string
in my
mother's freckled hand, neither a starfish
nor a
fish; solid, she never left the ground nor noticed
how we
were lifting away in short bursts, not smoothly
but
jerking like a car with a new driver.
Rattling the walls
we were
higher finally than the house. The
balloon burst.
We
milled around over the roof for years, picking up
the
little red pieces while my mother carried on inside,
followed
her path from here to there, and then we blew
away.
Gail Rudd Entrekin is Poetry Editor of Hip Pocket Press and
Editor of the online environmental literary magazine, Canary
(www.hippocketpress.com/canary). She is
Editor of the poetry anthology Yuba Flows (2007) and the poetry & short
fiction anthology Sierra Songs & Descants: Poetry & Prose of the Sierra
(2002). Her poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary
magazines, including Cimarron Review, Nimrod, New Ohio Review, and Southern
Poetry Review, and her poems were finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize in
Poetry from Nimrod International Journal in 2011. Entrekin taught poetry and
English literature at California colleges for 25 years. Her books of poetry include Rearrangement of
the Invisible, (Poetic Matrix Press, 2012), Change (Will Do You Good) (Poetic
Matrix Press, 2005), which was nominated for a Northern California Book Award,
You Notice the Body (Hip Pocket Press, 1998), and John Danced (Berkeley Poets
Workshop & Press, 1983). She and her
husband, poet and novelist Charles Entrekin, live in the hills of San
Francisco's East Bay.
