Line

Crossing the Line:  What It's Like

I.

First:

There is this—

the insatiable need for fact,

the coiled wire waiting to be unspooled,

the two steel towers, unstrung, facing the windless gorge,

a drowsy green bird dreaming of flight, and a tiger roused by hunger pain:

II.

Karl Wallenda, high wire walker, born January 21, 1905,

near Magdeburg, Germany, to a dancer and

trapeze artiste:  by ten, balancing

in beer halls;

conceiving the great seven-man pyramid, rising three tiers high,

in the winter of thirty-eight; leaving

retirement at sixty-nine

to set

the high-wire distance record (one-thousand-eight-hundred feet);

later, in a burst of wind over San Juan, falling

twelve stories to the lined,

hotel street.

Or:  the hum-

mingbird (Archilochus colubris),

smallest bird in the world, alone able to hover:  fans

its wings seventy beats-per-second, producing a humming sound;

feeds

on nectar pooled in salvia, thistle,

jewelweed, and the scarlet horn of trumpet vine; weaves

a nest of spider silk, laying eggs, each spring, the size of navy beans.

Or:  the four-hundred-pound tiger, biggest in the big-cat family filadae,

each tiger marked with a pattern of stripes as distinct

as fingerprints.  Night-hunter, searching

animal trails

and stream beds for buffalo, deer, boar, badger and hare; creeping

within thirty feet of prey; leaping the sandy line;

crushing throat or nape—eating men,

a rare case. 

III.

Then:

There is the terrible

tension we string in the wire,

the joules and foot-pounds of work performed by like, is, and as:

the Great Wallenda stepping as quiet and careful as a tiger stalking

its prey—for a moment, after the gust, hovering

mid-air, like a ruby-throated hummer

balanced

on invisible wings.  The tiny green bird, a floating spot on the tiger eye

of the sun—a weightless Wallenda fabricating crisscrossed lines

bridging the blank canyon of the sky,

linking bloom-

to-tree-to-post-to-nest-to-roof-to-rim—stringing up unstrung flowers

with geometrical flight.  The flaming orange tiger

falling like death on the up-turned

face

in the grass—tiger eyes shining with the hardness of emeralds

or rubies—the air humming with tension—the paws

electric with power before the deadly

arcing rush.

IV.

Here!  It is Wallenda falling.  Here!  The whirring of bright, green

wings.  Here!  A fiery pattern of stripes

flowing like finger-

prints.

V.

Last:

We have the writer,

writing—balancing words on a trembling wire,

funambulist crossing the line—this focused, verbal walking

always

done out of fear:  seeing

a crouched tiger at both ends, out

of need:  drinking trumpet nectar from the deep ruby wells

of blooms,

out of joy:  walking

where no human skin has ever

felt the wind, out of sheer abandon and devil-may-care—

crossing the line, stepping out, on the most wild and reckless of dares.