Your Stillness and Flight

Amy
Meng

Watching you dress for the last time
there is a certain grace in the motion
cast by the shadow of leaving:

Somehow as you crane
your neck down 
to button your shirt there are swans—

or the painting of swans
trapped in dripping oils
bursting from a lake.

Momentarily, it is all
a heroic rise of wings
that never descend:

People go to libraries and museums
to see the same animals housed
in the same traps again and again,

But you, who are made
from jungles of the living world,
are too precious to save.

Even as you exhale,
as you pull on a jacket and shoes,
parts of you vanish like water shaken into air.