Matthew Brennan
The Hang Glider

You’re not a bird because you fly like one.
It’s that you’re free—no gravity, no walls—
and so you hear the wind the way birds do.
Cut loose from outcroppings of rocky cliffs,
you slice zigzags above a river, turning
one way, another, waiting like a hawk
to sweep across the sky and glide until—
the gust that carried you now gone—you tip
your wings and start the necessary fall
by spiralling in downward circles ever
smaller, tighter, like a twister’s cone,
and then, windless at last, return to earth.