Sailing Flight

I remember how we walked
Down the dank wooden dock
Giddy trepidation,
Gilded by fear and surreality.

I remember white and clean
The tenets of this memory.
White, the boat and sky and vision bleached,
Clean, the air and aura.

Skimming over water
Blue and black and green
Buffeted by cool, dry wind,
Somehow wet and warm as well.

Stopping and sinking
Into waves of humidity
Stepping into plastic strappings,
To keep us somehow flying.

That day, somehow, I wore a tee shirt
With sleeves that didn't lick my elbows
It was white and stiff with pool chlorine,
And I took off my skirt to fly.

Up we rose, as the boat fled beneath us
Drawing us after with a rough rope of twine
We giggled and shrieked, my sister and I,
Our legs foreign, bare in the open.

Behind us, suspended in the heat of the height
A yellow balloon blossomed in the humidity
The distant boat or the false flying sun,
Which kept us afloat, I cannot recall.

And then it was quiet,
But the warm whisper of wind
We hung in the white and drank in the solitude,
Thick and rich as tears.

We sank back to earth
Ten minutes later
To the porcelain pocket in steely dark ocean,
Our rope and balloon disappearing.

How much smaller and colder
The earth seemed just then
How busy and noisome and angry,
To the sterile silence of sky.

I put on my skirt as the others took turns
Riding the milky expanse
They came back enameled, each one of the four,
In clean silver sweat and the residue of clouds.

And especially I remember
As we clambered to the mossy dock
How unnerving it was,
Recalling the sky.

The day was different
And I was different
I remember most clearly of all,
Since the moment I sailed the uppers of water.