The Earth is not Quiet

For Calvin Galazin

Even leaves are rattling

out of hearts. I gravel skid

and dive over my handlebars.

I know what the leaves are:

one formed from the heart of

the priest lifting this skinny boy

like some host five feet off

the altar and hanging him

from the pin in Christ's feet;

one shaped from the heart of

the German man on the line at

Dodge Truck, seventy-one years

old and he's still stretching

Cinderella's slipper

over 487 brake pedals each day,

fire and floating metal carriages

and she's piping them all night

beside her boy's oxygen tent;

another leaf for the father, who,

three hours earlier, slammed the rolling

hospital bed through doctors to find

a wall socket that would give

his blue boy oxygen. The boy

diving over his handlebars

because maybe this time the leaf

is the father's heart falling.