Fall

“We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.”

― Joseph Campbell, Sukhavati

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Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.   Denise Levertov

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Winter Litany   Robin Davidson
                        Kraków, March, 2004

I stand on Wawel Hill
in early March and morning snow
falls in flocks
tiny paper cranes
descending blowing dissolving
one into another
on the cobblestone walk
an avalanche of light

I believe this must be
what death is

this alternate
shining and melting, shining and flying

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“I like the floor as a place for grieving. You can't fall off." Kate Braestrup, Main Chaplain to Game Wardens on "Speaking of Faith."

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One Heart            Li-Young Lee

Look at the birds. Even flying

is born

out of nothing. The first sky

is inside you, Friend, open

at either end of day.

The work of wings

was always freedom, fastening

one heart to every falling thing.

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Grief Daybook II                    Carol Ann Davis

There are panels of sky
as good as forgotten, 

Evans' gelatin folds of Florida
circa 1934. The line of sky is dark at first

where the gulf lifts it,
then comes to me like a halo 

around the palm tree with its neck bent,

its spray of branches 

leaning out of frame
as if to flee. Its roots pull 

at sand, as if to say,
this is what it takes.

I'd believe, if not for the way

my breath catches, 

if not for the wild faint

sleep's become. The palm's branches

are spears left
where they've fallen 

in the dirty sand, too heavy

for the tide to take them. Where the neck bends, 

cut branches—like stubble on a chin
as seen from below—seem to ask

something of the photographer,
something not washed away

in the chemical bath. The shadow of the trunk
just underlines—means to prove the existence 

of the world. It's three o'clock

and the latticework of 1934 

is pulling around me in this light

as if to say my god, my god,

a hymn sung

by infidels to believers 

as a way to ask for water.

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Apprehension in the Blurry Trees                            Cameron Thomas

Fallen, what can a leaf care about being plucked from its
      branch?

Two crows forage on the roof across the street, stepping
      along a gutter, picking through tan and rusty
      swatches, and casting them to the ground.

One finds what he wants, so he steps to the edge, drops,
      and glides across the blurry trees.

The other remains, keeping a leaf in her beak as though
      it were a body.

She must be the one who speaks from the heart and ruins
      everything.

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Fall down seven times; get up eight.                                          Japanese proverb