Swan Dive

Here is a poem I wrote in 2014, when I really thought I would never feel love again, either toward another, or coming from another. That may sound like sad hyperbole, but I remember with clarity the defeatism that was my life then. Writing helps you hold on to these things. Life is a little better now.

Love is falling from a great height, plummeting toward Earth at high speed,

yet it's taking forever from my particular vantage point,

where I stand poised like a Greek archer with my bow,

arrow pulled back, awaiting the perfect shot.

She falls as gracefully as she lived, her long neck pointed straight down,

and lovely white, feathered body stretched out behind her. I can only watch.

I can't save her, nor was I the one who made the kill.

My arrow, tuned to my one open eye, follows her descent, ready to seal the deal,

my arms slowly adjusting the angle downward from my original position,

the right angle attitude straight up toward heaven,

as much directly away from Earth as it could possibly be.

Is she always falling, eternally? Will she ever reach the ground?

My flexed muscles are taught, holding the arrow in place, cocked, fingers cramping,

the tension running from my arms through my shoulders, down my back and into my legs.

I feel this tension everywhere at once, and even my mind blazes with my irrelevant task,

to deliver this load into the lifeless, falling corpse, like a gun with only blanks in a movie,

like a staged fistfight where the blows are faked, yet the audience flinches,

believing that one of the fighters is the victor, and one the vanquished.

Somewhere in the distance, and at some time in the future, Love must strike the horizon,

but I never get to see, and I never know it's done.

I stay fixed to my target while I still have life, stretched in purposeless, quiet agony,

always waiting for the moment when I'll know when to release.

All rights reserved. ©2014, 2020 Todd Franklin Osborn