He set up the radio
With bunny ears up.
She hung her toes
Over the edge of the cloud,
Looking down like a dreamy school girl
With the city lights in her eyes.
He would stand guard for airplanes,
With one hand shading his eyes
And the other funneled over his ears

When the stars popped out
Like poison ivy blisters,
They would cover themselves
In clumps of clouds,
Like fleece blankets
Staring longingly at the sky in cricketless
silence.
“I wonder if we'll ever leave this place,” he'd ask.
“We have everything here,” she'd say.
“I want to see the world.”
“But you see it every day.”

When they were bored
They would count the birds
And whisper words of love
Like the fresh wind.
Heads pressed into the soft cloud
And feet wiggling above them,
Jellyfish in the sky,
Separated by miles and miles
From their kin: scurrying ants below.
The soft cotton balls of trees,
Grids of open fields and splotches of
little towns,
The sparkling lights at nighttime
Like a second set of stars

“I'll never leave you,” he would say.
“You have nowhere to go,” she would laugh.
“Down.”
She tickled his side.
“One day, we'll jump. See that world.”
She looked into his sparkling eyes
and grasped his hand.
They slid to the end of the cloud
Like the fifth platform at the pool
3
2
1
They fell swirling and guppy-faced,
Helicopters from an oak.
They never let go