Fifth grade science classmates
observed my first faint
and I came to looking at the bottom
of my wooden chair
from the waxed floor.
Before memory
could reassemble itself,
the world was made
of fractured shapes
erased of meaning.
Only seconds
on the world clock
but the detachment, the perfect
role of observer, resounds
like a cello note played long
and low under the years.
I don’t remember
falling, and I was not caught.
But I awoke unaware,
with danger fully swept back. Here
I could fall endlessly
and never fear landing,
noting the instruments,
the children’s owl faces
peering down, the funny angles
of light, without self
consciousness, without a story
insisting on being told.
I have been a thin wire of watching
as the world blinked into being.
This is how swooning
taught me to believe
in an afterlife.
