"Fear of Happiness"

Looking back, it's something that I've always had:
As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator
I cround at at the bottom of it, 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.
.............................-A.E. Stallings

Poetry, March 2010