for Namgial Rinchen
Sweet Babel of birdsong syncopates
dawn's light as bruised as the hematoma
oozing under the skin of my left knee.
Sudden leaves reshape trees and the delicate longing
of tree frogs pipes snow into a bad memory
old as falling. My knee still aches
from Sunday's tumble on the pallet I didn't see
over the stack of sawn aspen I carried
for the night fire. Unmindful, I tripped
on an iron fence stake cockajar
against the woodpile, this time breaking
my fall with my palm's life line.

My history of falls is unkind. At five, I
plunged through a rotten barn board
all the way from the hay mow
while shafts of numinous straw
whirled like moths on fire
past my Dad shoveling manure.
I smashed into the concrete floor wet
with cow piss near the Holstein's hooves.
Her licorice eyes were big as my fists
as she bawled at me this
first lesson of gravity.

At ten, when I slipped on ice
running for the school bus, I lay
on my back watching my breath
and snow become the ghosts of bare
maple limbs twirling blind white. Not wanting to
move my spine's broken porcelain, I
froze hoping to melt into all
that was pure and cold. When I couldn't
rise, my dad carried me in, cursing
my clumsy and bruised tailbone.

Afterward, falls pocked each year, unpredictable
as a broken clock, until
I crashed in a midnight parking lot,
both hands in my back pockets,
boot catching the cement bumper
turned upside down and painted with tar.

My chin cracked the curb first,
breaking my jaw, then ripping three
ribs from the sternum. What came
from my mouth was garbled
as birdsong, a blood murmur I mistook
for a scream for help. What I remember
are the three good people who walked
around me, not stopping and
the table full of cops I could see
through the restaurant glass, who never shifted
from coffee mugs overlooking
the wounded rug of my body. What I
remember is my lover's face white
as a terrified swan as he lifted me.

Above Mangyu Village, I hiked the thin
trail far above tree line to sunset,
bending to the infinitesimal
in the shape of a plant I could barely see,
petals the size of molecules, its yellow center
smaller than a drop of blood, when the mountain
tilted, and my shoes slid gathering speed
on talus that rattled like oiled marbles of fate.
I could not stop and wondered whether to fly
off the ridge pressed flat so
I wouldn't somersault the thousand feet
to the valley or to sit back on my heels
as if my boots were skis. The last moment
I grabbed the only thing that held
the last rim, a turquoise rock.

The other climbers thought my yelling
a joke, all but the Sherpa who leapt sure
as a mountain goat, zen master
of shifting stone, and snatched my wrists
to yank me back to the path.
We sat then, breathing for a long time, unwinding
our stories like prayer flags
strung out in Himalayan wind.

How do we ever thank who
or what saves us? Namgial told me to look
at the turquoise rock still clutched in my palm.
We call that a god's eye, he said, and there
in one sea-colored facet was etched the eye
almond as Buddha's and open
as if it knew, while above us,
a Himalayan eagle incinerated
before falling to the other side of the world.