Parachute
I am crawling through a parachute. It's a tunnel of gauze or silk or
ripstop, with Persephone pushing my knees. I am blindfolded with a green
silk scarf. Or maybe it's purple. Isadora's dancers or dragonflies push my
body into distortions. I am wild inside gauze. Spinning inside air.
Crawling in the dark towards a flicker of light. It's a mystery covered by a
cocoon while meteor showers explode over my shoulders.
There aren't any instructions, and I'm surrounded by ripstop. I'm free
falling from the air with prayer flags drifting around my ankles. Floating
in the dark. Yellow and black stripes of light and shadow drift across my
feet. Banded bees are trying to tell me stories, but all I hear is a buzzing
in my ears. I am rolling down a long green hill a long time ago. I am
picking a wild bouquet of poppies for my second grade teacher.
I am walking the high beams of the new houses abandoned by the carpenters of
the late afternoon. The last farm stopped giving pumpkins last October, but
this is a good place to collect discarded nails with my 8-year-old friends.
The beams are an open theatre, and the shadows tell us stories. We have
borrowed our mothers' scarves, and we are teaching the bees how to dance.
My lover and I are dancing barefoot after midnight. We are both covered with
oil inside a steam of jasmine flowers. I skate counterclockwise over his
body before the second hand stops. We might be in Kyoto or Tel Aviv, but the
walls are now a blur. My heart is shaking, or maybe it is the walls.
The tunnel is streaming with gauze as I crawl in the semi-dark. The bees are
humming softly on the other side of the parachute. The tone is silk or
translucent, and floating. It's a new kind of music that I refused to listen
to before. The bees say the erotic is in the shadows, and nobody can love
without the wound. They tell me we all need to be pierced to know the
mystery.
I am dancing inside a parachute, and suddenly I don't know how to fall. I am
high above a ferris wheel of strangers, a thousand paper cranes after the
bomb explodes at Hiroshima. The sake, still warm from the heat of your
hands, is spilling across the table while you paint on my back with
ink-covered fingers.
There is someone whose collarbone I see in my dreams. He sings to me in bass
or tenor overtones in a familiar language. I can almost hear him breathing
while poppies grow through the cracks in the slate path. I meet him in the
tunnels between the pyramids.
— Diane Frank
