Tower Poem by Max Dahlquist

Once we got outside of town, the stars grew and multiplied; scattered pinpricks of soft light became mercilessly brilliant holes in the blackness. We drove until the road burrowed into the trees and became organic, caressing the contours of the hillsides, making furtive climbs, then diving back into the valleys, the van shuddering over potholes. Branches stretched above up, frozen in mid-reach, waiting for our attention to lapse so they could reach out and make us disappear, drowning out the glow of the frail waning moon, casting everything as a silhouette.

Let me take your hand
Summer is cold and distant
and I've lost my way

The stairs to the tower twist upward, riding ambivalently on the wind. The Milky Way is painted with a backhanded stroke across the sky and I've given up trying to keep my lower jaw steady. There are steel bars crisscrossing the windows, sensibly placed to restrain us from plunging down to the ground beneath, too dark to see. We squeeze through, letting our torsos hang over certain death, craning our necks to the infinite, praying for meteorites and UFOs, trying desperately to rise closer, to fall off the world and drift slowly away. We scream for the impossible, we demand the universe, we tear against an Earth that is heavier than we could possibly imagine, indignant against the clouds, the smog, the city lights, against the words and memories, the indignities and sentiments and disconnect we hold in our jacket pockets and refuse to allow to fall.

Let me take your hand
I'll want to be holding on
when gravity fails