LIGHT TETHER
There’s a sorrow
that comes from recognizing
you’re not too tightly tethered
to the world,
that if someone asked
what’s keeping you
all you could be is quiet
and pensive,
sitting on the porch
with a couple of friends
who are good at interpreting
the shapes of clouds.
You can’t feel how fast you’re going here.
Obligations
are a form of gravity.
The truely free
are thrown off,
sparks
from a grinding wheel.
Sometimes very little
keeps us:
a phrase, a misunderstanding
of our worth, or lack of it,
a thirst for symmetry
or music that might say
something
we thought was a solution,
or the love of our regrets.
But mostly we remain,
light as rising balloons
that inspire neither questions
or answers as they float
away from what held them,
obligated only to the indifference
of physics few would be so callous
as to explain at the moment
we disappear from sight.