Six Seconds

Memory lifts her murky mirror							
for the girl 
while the Perseids blaze
through the humid haze of the waxing 
Red Moon.

The girl steals a last glance 
at her life
rushing upward as she falls
heavy and warm, through the old wooden walkway
beside the sturdy tracks of the railroad bridge,
so high above the grind and gurgle
of the stinking river thicket below
that she has time to think
on the way down. 

With her dozen remaining heartbeats
the girl remembers a line from an old sonnet,

	If I should die, think only this of me

	that I loved the falling stars
	that the ground killed me
	not the fall.
	Don’t
		blame 
			the fall.