Bounce Castle

The children clustered in the castle, buoyed
by keeping childhood’s minor secrets
 
Maybe they did not know one another’s names,
only the shapes of their bodies bounding
and ungrave
 
Parents grouped like dim tally marks
on the outskirts of consciousness,
held off by the castle’s completeness in itself
 
When we consider the cruelty of the old gods
we wonder whether they embodied
nature’s indifference or created it
 
For a moment, the wind waited
 
It did not. Don’t speak of wind
as volition or of castle as metaphor
for safety, for its illusion,
for its impermanent reality
 
Don’t speak of the children who rose with the castle
when the wind gusted, who fell
as it tilted towards the retreating earth,
opening its mouth. Don’t
 
speak of them as fated
 
Don’t say any child who moments
before left the castle — to pee, for a drink,
needing her shoelace tightened  —
is loved more or less by destiny
 
Language
ascribes purpose to any horror
 
I don’t stop imagining how
the bouncy castle rose and the mothers
ran towards it screaming
 
ran towards their children
returning at terminal velocity
same as any object in space