Night Vision

When Russell Gates stepped off a cliff that night

some twenty years ago, he never really hit

but like a soul in hell compelled to suffer an eternity

of closed-loop pains is falling still.

How often I have seen him stumble

from his tent to urinate, I cannot say;

but he always goes the wrong direction,

makes the same unchangeable mistake.

Death after death, he fumbles with himself

and falls in silence down the shafted dark.

I used to think he got up in a dream

and wandered toward a voice

where it hovered shaped like his name

out over the wide abyss filled black,

two sounds trilled like a bird call,

with the last note falling;

or that something took his hand

and jumped with him, whispering,

"this night is bottomless."

He couldn't have known

what was dream and what was real

until he woke or unwoke at the end,

and even then we cannot say.

Only this much is clear:  Any one of us,

rising to a common need some given night,

may see for the first time

how the sky is crowded with black kites

and, taking one of the dangled strings,

be pulled away.

--Neal Bowers