If This is Your Final Destination

They say you are made of clouds, they say you

are made of feathers, they say you are everywhere

or nowhere—we know you are both. Our flight

is delayed, this airport another nowhere. If this

is your final destination, the air murmurs, if

a stranger or anyone you do not know well offers you

anything ... but how well & what's he offering &

is this our final destination? At the hotel a man

hands us the key to room three one three—home

for a week or so. On the lobby tv a woman once

apparently enormous holds her old jeans up to her

body & smiles. Neil Diamond sings & when I go in-

to the bathroom he follows. Everybody has one.

Paradise is cloudless, they say, impossible to know.

Yesterday a man was sucked into the earth as he

slept—a sinkhole opened below his bed—not even

his brother could save him. In the hotel restaurant

my daughter orders corn flakes, they come with a

pitcher of milk, she pours nearly all of it into her bowl,

until I stop her she will keep on pouring. Three more

tvs are screwed into the wall above us—a car goes

round & round, a pitcher throws a baseball, a woman

slams her racket to the clay. My daughter pushes her

bowl away, picks two packets of jelly from the basket,

pulls the plastic off one, then the other, lifts each to

her tongue—red, then purple. The wallpaper is

the texture of trees, a landscape seen from above,

a contour map of an unnamed mountain, people

wandering the face of it. If we were closer we could tell

river from leaf, mountain from shadow, a fire making,

unmaking itself. What is this strand of DNA between

us, unconnected to & of the shadows parading past, our

outlines already chalked into the earth? I live

on air & light, I drag my daughter everywhere,

this morning she muttered Federer Federer Federer

like a spell & it was as if he stood before us again, his

perfect red jersey. How many mornings, the sun not yet

up, did I swivel on the red stool at the supermarket

lunch counter, my mother in back extruding donuts,

the aisles dark & empty behind us—she'd bundled me

into the car still sleeping to get there. I'd twirl or

wander or make toast, contemplating the basket

of butter & jelly, each in its little wasteful tub,

impervious to air or time or decay. Angel of Grape,

your purple body not only filled those coffins

but took the shape of those coffins—emptiness made

whole, color now a shape. Angel, my daughter now

wants only you, she asks for the whole basket, she

pulls back each sheet, puts her tongue in—

strawberry is her favorite, because it tastes

like strawberry.

Source: My Feelings (Graywolf Press, 2015)