I can’t say I didn’t know we were out of gas, I can’t say I didn’t want this falling feeling, clouds made of icy swords and flashes of a small-town life: summer kisses, warm beef steak, fresh milk with a skin on top. I haven’t felt anything in far too long. I do what they tell me: spend my nights in the sky and an hour later I don’t remember how I got down alive. And this, the air on my face, cut-grass smells and roses, yowls (dogs barking), the kerrr-ack (my body breaking), and a dream, that old wise woman, her finger on my brow, it’s all I ever wanted, and I got the moon too and loud night birds, my friends scratched up but alive, OK, just fine, and—pulled the cord a second late, just a second, nobody knows, the sky up against me with her thousand fists, a belly flop, a dive off a really high board. Look at him, they’ll say, it happens, an accident, a tragedy, he was so very brave, a purple heart maybe, a wife bent over me, proud; I can’t remember her face but her belly’s bigger than before. This will be a better death, not at home but somewhere like it; not a wet swamp crash, my body missing, growing mushrooms, or me not dead at all but clenching teeth, raining liquid down on lush green leaves and bright thatched houses with small and happy husbands inside.