Plein Air

Plein Air

When we look out at the land,
it will always look back at us,
bottom-heavy. Nothing grows
from the ceiling down, or from
the sky. Give helium balloons
a day or two, and down they go,
like wedding guests dancing
to “Shout,” a little bit softer now,
softer, crouching lower and
lower. Give us enough years,
and our bodies shrink. On a
doorway in your childhood
home, a pencil flips around
and scrubs away a mark with
its nubby eraser. We can sort
everything in the universe
into two categories: stuff
or space. Stuff stays down,
space goes up. If the river
didn’t lie down beneath the
ground, and if the ground
didn’t stay so obediently,
how could we trust our easel
to stand up when we wanted
to paint the sky in the water
and the sky in the sky.