Cassandra Cleghorn’s poem “Good to Go” appeared in our Winter 2000 issue. Her collection Four Weathercocks was published in April.
You get yourself to the point where you’re sketching on napkins. How to cluster the balloons, rate of lift. Altimeter, penknife, compass, jerky, two-way radio, Coca-Cola, L.A. County road map, pellet gun, question mark, question mark. If you should plummet, slash the water jugs rigged to the frame light as a bird’s bones. Christening: Inspiration. The end of lists.
Calm in your lawn chair, tilting slightly, tethered to forty-two weather balloons, you’re vaulted two miles up into the third busiest airspace in North America, saying, Wow, man! Unreal! All the gear secured except the gun, which does lurch from your lap. You watch it fall toward the motherboard of a city, until your eye can’t parse the splinter
the gun becomes. No way in heck. Machines of rising and descent. No way. Evidently the helium begins leaking out. So you plunge, raining spring water until your chair parts the power lines above some guy’s house and you hang there like something the stork bought. Fifteen years later you will shoot yourself in the San Gabriel Mountains, above a place called Idlehour.
But what if the Santa Anas had claimed your rig, gusts wheeling off the canyons? Soaring over Highway One, over the spine of sand keeping everything we do from all we wish for and can never know; streaks of sapphire and beryl stone; broad, rusting bands of kelp; clarity to a point; silhouettes; depth. Skim off the top fathom: no bright fishes, just primitive stuff getting by in the dark.
Eyes strain, soreness in the neck. Ease back in yours ling off waffle webbing. Try out a theory: space mirrors the sea. There will be time to consider objections. A sip of Coke. Revert to verses marked in mind alone, something, something, yes, sandstone’s crumble. Remove by day in their sight, in their sight. Sigh, but not aloud, Transistor falls, unremarkable plash.
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