I’ve been to the top of the world,
and I’ll tell you – it’s not what
you’d imagine it to be.
I climbed up piles of dirt and ash,
got the soot of that high place
all over my eyelids,
in the crevices of my elbows
and under the bend of my tongue,
up to the point of tasting it,
up to the point of sticking my finger
in my ear and discovering all sorts
of debris there, inside my skull.
You might not believe it,
but there was fog up there.
I thought I’d see everything
ever made, you know?
Like there would be lights
twinkling and other small romantic
details I’d want to write you about
on a postcard, and I’d describe them
like I was writing a poem, and you’d
stand in your driveway reading it and
think, “gosh, I wish I was there with you,
seeing these beautiful things.”
but when I was up there, there was this fog.
The higher I hiked the more it touched
my skin, like went into it touched,
like suffocated my pores,
like I couldn’t see even my own hand waving
in front of my eyes, and it was all dark
up there. These little droplets of water
that came from God-knows-where settled
on my eyelashes, and my blue raincoat
pressed against my arm, kind of sticky feeling.
when I was up there, I thought for awhile
that maybe all the black molten waste
was something more just a tragic death
everyone calls lovely like Juliet,
but it was just black molten waste.
I couldn’t love it, that high place
because it was lonely up there.
It was steep up there,
when my foot touched the sides of the rocks
and small bits fell over the edge, I thought
of falling and I think that if I fell from up there,
I’d fall in slow-motion like movies,
and the background would fade into these
strange colors or clouds or something.
I thought about writing you
that postcard, thought about
throwing it down from the
height to see if it’d glide
straight into your mailbox,
and you’d put it on the fridge
where you’d notice it only as you
were getting out a slice of cheese
or storing away the left-over pesto pasta
you like so much.
it’d sit there underneath a magnet
they gave you for free at the grocery store,
and you’d pretend I was having the time of my life,
pretend with a little smile and picture me
dancing in a luau up on the heights of creation
when really the words I wrote you
on the postcard said
“the view isn’t so great from up here.”
