A Little Further

I hold a bouquet of balloons that spell I love you and hand them to the sky, who has always looked out for me like a mother or a teacher or a god. And once I let them obey the helium they are made of and float up, up, up, there are red tracks across my palm where I wrapped the ribbons too tight. Above, the sun paces slowly, wipes its brow with a cloud shaped like a cloud and wrings it out somewhere over the sea. Balloons, it turns out, can float very high into the atmosphere - like, if people let go of more balloons, they would drift past our windows on the plane ride home, less like objects and more like the weather. The balloons mean the sky and I are working together to make something new. They are a flare to the cosmos, a small way to tell the clouds and the stars beyond them that on earth, art & love are being made, if only by balloonmen and their lovers. I wave goodbye as they exit stage up, red-dressed dancers nodding in the blue.

Author’s note: This poem is in memory of John Cage & Merce Cunningham, who were partners in life, creation, and a new type of song-and-dance. Cage once characterized their collaboration as composer and choreographer as “less like an object and more like the weather.” “In an object,” he said, “you can tell where the boundaries are. But in the weather, it’s impossible to say when something begins or ends.”