The Third Heaven

The moment you feel your feathers brush cage wires, you fly the coop and you’re running homeless now, roosting in dust and railroad tracks and learning to find freedom in cracked paving stones against an aching back and family in the cold kindness of strangers (a little girl gives you her ice cream and says you look sad and you wonder why, because you’re not, and she has your sister’s eyes)-

And you go west because that’s the cardinal direction of flight, because golden fields, world without end, only look like each other and the careless sky is big enough to feel yourself drifting out of your too-tight skin, running up and up and away until you’ve claimed all the distance to the moon to wander in, wander up tall stormheads in circles and through tornadic winds with lightning in your eyes and sometimes you barely make it back inside before the sky collpases onto the ground in a column in front of you and sweeps you away-

But you do make it, make it inside some farmer’s house, hide in his basement and imagine the wailing sirens in the city that are too far away to hear over the storm, just like the ones back where you started running-

And after, you go lay out under the night, and the sky is far too clear to have just boiled over, firmament-jewels burning above the air and above the moon and beyond the limits of your wandering, heavenly storms too far away to fear and wayward planets sprinting in circles around their stars, soft, cool reminder against your back of the wayward planet beneath you, running and running and turning and turning and suddenly you are tired, all the cosmos dancing furiously around you and spinning and spinning and showing face after face to one another, or like the moon keeping half hidden even in flight, and if the earth will keep on hurtling away even after you’re asleep, running forever and never, never running away, maybe you’ll let the heavens do the dancing and give into the pull of gravity like flying.

Flying home.