Like a Word on the Tip of Your Tongue
When you drop from the pullup bar onto the old wooden stoop of your cabin in Costa Rica, and your heart beats twice and then not at all, don’t panic, but rather linger in the stillness, in the absence where the beat should be, and notice your blood begin to languish and while you wait look around at the trees, beautiful trees, in this jungle that surrounds you, this cloud forest full of colorful birds and monkeys and sweet smells and clean air and sunlight, so bright, so warm, and the tourists off to the left on a hike through the forest, who could be called upon to assist but whose water bottles and first aid kits can’t do anything at all
//
feel the blood move again, from your chest to your hands to your fingertips like water through arteries and into the limbs of the trees around you and see the tourists walking walking walking their bodies away and breathe in ragged so that the air burns cold against your throat and your fingers tingle and your eyes blink like window shutters up and down and up
don’t die, but be alive like on the roof of the water tower when you saw yourself in every star, each one a dying sun or already dead, hear the song of the birds all around and even that just an echo, like you, just an echo and imagine it gone, the silence
//
feel your heart contract hear the breath that is deafening let your feet stand on flat beams of wood rotting like the desiccated shrimp bugs far from the ocean that have come above ground to die by the thousands
hold yourself like an illusion that yearns to shatter, the strain in your chest, unspoken words, see the clouds as puffs of smoke to be sucked back in until they never were and always were and never were a part of you
//
feel the blood rush to your ears hear nothing but a noise like breaking surf and sit down on the stoop, this beached driftwood
try to breathe the birdsong back into your body
//
feel your heart pound and then pause
don’t do a damn thing
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
Feel the blood move again, as if it never stopped, look around at the trunks of trees, the throats of birds, the wooden slats of the cabin
hear the quetzal’s cry like a word on the tip of your tongue until you remember or it slips away
decide to sit down in the rocking chair and rock back and forth on the porch where the birds fly into the window and fall to the wood too stunned to move and lie there until they die or return to flight.
