What serves as bearing in an unhinged world?
How does one find true north in a drifting cosmos?
If I might have my say, I would plant my roots
heavenward and insist on growing upside down.
Create time and space daily for a bit of whimsy
and turn every living thing on its head, literally.
On occasion, begin with a headstand and from
that inverted angle observe the hapless world.
Right side up, it’s the shadow of an empty skull
in skeleton shuffle dancing to a final countdown,
its ticking metronome by now more than a touch
psychotic with all its calamities—the holocaust
of Hiroshima, the collapse of the Towers, the long,
bleak narratives of a long, bleak history—all, all
a cancer of the human breast rolled into a little ball
of tumor falling to the black of a black hole grave.
But branching out upside down from a sky-rooted
headstand, one would naturally scatter words
of an alternate reality, mine a gospel designed in
maple seeds swirling down like the whirligig
wings of an angel choir. The barn doors of the day
swing wide open to claim and store that harvest,
each seed a poem to plant one tree after another
sprouting leaves for healing the nations—medicinal,
never fading, heaven on earth—if I had my say. But
I’ve learned to accept death as a study of quiet breath
a discipleship of any morning breeze that elevates
the soul simply by the mere articulation of its leaves.
Douglas L. Talley retired from law and now offers a writers’ workshop for inmates of the Northeast Reintegration Center in Cleveland, Ohio. This poem originally appeared in, or evolved from, his MFA thesis, A Wounded God in Every Mirror. He is married to the novelist A. R. Talley, whose MFA thesis, (and most recent book), Between Sunrise and Sunset, was recently released by Black Rose Writing.
