Tilt

Just as the world tilts forward, and the sky

is a raw, stretched canvas. I am a photograph

left to develop in a bath of acid.

The yellow line, once a steady guide,

a docile spine, now unravels like a nerve.

My hands, clenched at the wheel,

are two pale animals burrowing for warmth.

Behind me, the familiar landscape shrinks

to a memory, a blurred postcard.

The trees are tall, blurred strokes of umber and pine.

I can’t look back at the place where the ground was level.

I couldn’t if I tried.

The engine sings a low, desperate note,

a vibrato of what’s to come.

I feel the shift in my core,

a weightless atom sliding inside me.

The horizon, once so wide and certain,

is a needle’s eye, a perfect puncture.

And I am a filament, pulled through.

A ghost, a thing with no anchor.

I have unhooked from the known,

the gravity of comfort, the predictable.

The slope is a promise, a steep descent.

And I am letting go.

The sound of it is a single, clean intake of breath.

It is the last moment of stillness

before the fall.

And the air, it is a new kind of cold,

a breeze against my cheek.

The wind rushes past, a sound like paper tearing.

My hair, a dark spill,

flies out behind me,

a banner of surrender.

I am an arrow shot from a bow,

a body moving now with its own terrible will.

The speed is a thrum in my ears,

a low and steady buzzing.

The old world is a coin dropped from my grasp,

spinning and diminishing.

I am moving into the silver,

the bright, unblemished light.

The fall is a freedom,

a kind of cruel grace.