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Trampoline

By Joshua WeinerPosted Tuesday, March 4, 2003, at 11:28 AM ET

Listen to Joshua Weiner reading this poem.

The kids next door who bought it for their mom
on Mother's Day—a joke?—
play it like palms on a marching drum,
a rhythmic coital creak
that carries clear across the open yard
to call my son like a Barnum top-hat bard.

He runs out in his socks, my turn, my turn!
They haul him up so he
might bounce and stamp and lift his legs to learn
how little one can weigh
up there, the moment when the body peaks
and hangs, becoming what the body seeks:

weightlessness and weight; self launching beyond self;
before the theory, fact.
Yet as he flies, he drops down like a leaf
the earth tries to give back.
He tumbles, caught at last in the canvas sheet,
then feels again through socks the warm concrete.

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Joshua Weiner is the author of The World's Room. He teaches at the University of Maryland.

Click here to visit Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.To submit poetry to Slate, send up to five poems and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to: Robert Pinsky, Slate Magazine, Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA, 02215.

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