Span

There is a hook that lives
in me, and any hand may tie
its line to the eye,
to reel me where it will,
to cast me out
in counterfeits of flight,
to tease a world of mouths
with intimations of a meal.

And I have learned through long repeat
the grammar of gravity,
the whiplash and the crash.

But in that span,
in the arc between the wrist’s snap
and the impact,

I am sovereign in a blue country
and am food for nothing.