FALL Poem by Conor O'Callaghan

To unbalance. To keel over, accidentally, or submit to the pressures of gravity.
To plummet in worth, especially currency.
To lose altitude. To take place at some pre-ordained time and date.
To swallow tall tales at face value.
To lag such a distance back along the trail as to disappear from view.
To surrender, especially a country,
to the enemy camped in its margins for all of two nights and three days.
To vanish from the radar of grace.
To have no qualms any longer when it comes to telling friends and foes alike
precisely where to stick
their olive branches. To be the kind of sap who lapses now and then
into clandestine amorous crushes.
To indulge a whole continent its own broadleaf syllable for autumn.
To arrive back unexpectedly in the afternoon
and happen upon yourself dancing a single-handed two-step on the landing
to Bechet's ‘As-tu le Cafard?'
To go, especially too far. To leave some unknown pal a shot behind the bar
and teeter out upon the dawn,
its parabola of stars, as wobbly on your pins as any newborn foal.
To bolt awake on a balcony
and see the horizon's twinset of Med and azure in the Blinky Palermo abstract
that has lain open in your lap.
To realise the only part of flight you can handle is that moment after take-off
into a blank of unmarked blue.
when you feel like a kite getting nowhere fast or a balloon strung out on helium.
To listen to sound effect CDs so often
every track eventually returns to the common denominator called ‘wind in trees'.
To think the hymns of Ulrich Zwingli funny.
To praise a glass half full of homespun pear brandy that tastes of lighter fuel.
Also, to dwell on the bruise
of one dropped apple. Also, to descend and keep descending until it becomes
a sort of modus vivendi, a buzz.
Also, to stumble and nonetheless to continue, and always to be happy to go down
in history as anybody's fool,
and somehow to believe in parachutes, and still to find it within you to forgive
the leaves whatever it is leaves do.