Meridian

Turning to

weightless

implements

of gear-click

hedging in

instamatic

blue, our ticking

gaze

in light

like waves,

overturning

A lifeline,

a forerunning wake of life

rafts and instruments,

luminal seconds

in cesium

skimmed threshold

or eleventh hour

draped

across

the doorjamb.

We lack fear of flatness

or our impalement

on axes, blinking

a reticle of stasis:

turn it over and begin

again, this dripping

like TV test patterns.

Let’s stay, I say,

and buoy ourselves

in river locks

intercalated

in channels

or our fender-bent

synapses, recycling

this floating.

Never believing in water torture or autisms as misfortune,

we were counting gold in a pointillistic landscape of radiating

boulevards. In Budapest, a necropolis of shifting foci grid-dots.

Soviet heroes, missing limbs.

The thought does not sadden us,

but the calculation

of sundials:

whether flat or equatorial

they always deliver

this sublimating ice

(we are tapping on the ceiling)

Source: Fruitlands (Litmus Press, 2006)