Tiptoe Lightning
Tragedy saunters to the pit, swinging its depth charge. If you had X-ray vision you could watch these bones climbing the Mountain Vainglorious without quite touching the ground. Let's ruin our letters, erase all foreign prospect. So many expeditions are but fictive inflections, the garbled ambition of someone stepping up with, like, something less lovely than the legs of Rome. Thumb power instead of “timber:" The answer from above the stage rattles our windows, a modern letter sent from antiquity, its blurred flourish abundantly gutted.
Elizabeth Willis, "Tiptoe Lightning" from Meteoric Flowers. Copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth Willis. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source:
Meteoric Flowers
(Wesleyan University Press, 2006)