Fear of Happiness

Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had:

As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator

I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight,

Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through,

Though someone always said I’d be all right—

Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad

(The nothing rising underfoot). Then later

The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch,

Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view,

The merest thought of airplanes. You can call

It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep;

But it isn’t the unfathomable fall

That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,

It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.