The Dare

Lovers still climb into those wicker baskets,
into the gondolas of hot-air balloons.

In theory, they’re open to Victorian deaths.
Not that they believe that waiver they sign

before they take the plunge — hopefully upward.
Not for a moment. Love’s chemical wash

has bathed their brains with that forever sauce.
We wave to them as they lift into the atmosphere,

that incandescence of warm evening gloam.
Up there, they look like the soigné dolls

girls force into arranged and plastic marriages
when they are eight, omnipotent on pink beds.

But this is true love. The gush of hot air
and flame, like a giant’s belly pressed.

They watch their friends on earth below
shrink and vanish. Then the pilot-aeronaut

just suddenly disappears. And they swoon
in lovely fear, into each other’s fates.