Into the Bird's Shadow   ALICIA BEALE   Towers or skyscrapers, welders juxtaposed between steel beams ten stories high or you caught up in make-it-yourself furniture, what's the difference? Go ahead, have lunch on the outcropping between buildings, dangle your legs thirty stories above intersections, smoke a cigarette with the pigeons. I'll still be kneeling among roses, pulling out the clover. I'll still be beginning to ache for an afternoon when the chance of falling out of the sky or out of love lessens. I think of Icarus' sweaty scalp on his last afternoon flying and I want to ask do you know what hands are for if they are not wings but handles, areas to grasp and grasping. Even now the neighbors thrust their wild pink geraniums beside the garage, and the lilac reeks its heady musk for night. A bird's shadow crosses ground and I look up, expecting to see you. I like to remember you afterwards with your limbs stretched out across our bed and the sound of a lawn mower humming somewhere else. Your arms thrown open as if giving up or giving in to me, your lips tasting mine. You as the welder from the sky or the carpenter of dressers make my body into a blush, one more rose. I look up but there are no more birds, only this sunlight falling through somewhere else, and I think about the making of love, of putting together the beams of sky to touch the turning earth. Alica Beale is a usability specialist in Phoenix, whose avocations are dancing and tai chi chuan. Her work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Hawaii Review, Southern Poetry Review, New Letters, Seattle Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Hubbub, Poet Lore, Southern Humanities Review, New Delta Review, Greensboro Review, and Florida Review. TLR Web home page