Verticle Thoughts for Sasha and Andre

Sometimes what is left is a dead branch
jutting out a canopy of leaves, which, in the
bettered minds, is understood as caressed blue.

And is fine and all, but what of grey winter?
Or palm tree fronds? As you may have expected,
just when an answer arrives, an abutting exception

collapse, as might fall coconuts or icicles.
Children are right to climb in oaken summer
because when they reach the sulk of adulthood

heights are for faces with feathered loss,
flown with the fleet meetings of yesterday,
not meant to be understood as belonging.

So the accouterments of our home mortgages,
which, I would recommend, should not be
without, somewhere amidst all of that polish,

a spiral staircase. Grotesquely imaginary
or banefully real, painted an absorbing black
and the steps silently padded for your own

breath, scared heartbeat, how both effect your
vision when wound up by a helix not unlike
the contusion of the landscape, now being

viewed from where you wanted your climb to
sponge together clarity from what rises in a haze,
like the cleared living room gone past the flume.

It’s a view that sees no further than the ground
and only less of it is there in the smokey dew
whisked after the addition of a bitter starch.