For Daredevils

What could they do to you?
After you danced on that 3/4 inch wire a quarter mile up
for forty five minutes on a cloudy August morning -
no one could touch you

Not even the police who manhandled you into an elevator
could bully the artist out of you
During the trip down 110 stories
you had the stones to steal a watch
from one of their wrists.

On that morning
you were perfection
Showing us all the precarious balance
between death, life, beauty, insanity and love
Everything underneath and above you
was a canvas you used your balancing pole to brush upon.
Your audience, far below, simultaneously not believing
and believing what was going on
over their heads

I was ten
And I hated those ugly towers for taking away the title
of tallest building in the world away
from my beloved Empire State
New York City now had these
two hideous sticks in Battery Park
These two, meaningless chunks of steel
built merely to be, high
Just to make someone money

But you gave them a heartbeat
Made them authentic.
While they supported your lifeline
you filled it with dreams, blood, possibility
and an identity
that gave it inclusion to the city's skyline

When they fell I thought of you saluting the world
Lying down to talk to a seagull
Jumping up and down as you flirted with the unknown
after those chisels traveling six hundred miles an hour
destroyed your La Pieta

And I see that same art in a plane landing on the Hudson River
captained by a pilot as in the moment as you
I see death in another plane crashing into a house
brought down by the weight of ice that you were too hot to accumulate
I see poetry in an African American becoming president
who is going to need much more than hope to succeed
I see fear in leveraged credit swaps that went horribly wrong
and no one knows where the money went
I see life when a class ring is recovered from a sewer grate
just a couple of miles from where those towers were flattened
I feel despair every time I try to count to a trillion
wondering when the Hell we forgot how to share
And I know it's going to take more than the selfless and outrageous act of one person
to fix or distract us from this mess we've put ourselves in

But you,
for us
You put all of yourself out there
Leaving your image there for us to see
Frozen in time
You owned the clouds
Blew them away from you that morning
You controlled the air
Kept the wind from blowing you down into the plaza

You showed us
a gift
Of one man
On a wire
Being one breath from dying
One step from continuing to live
And one picture
Of immortality