Voiceover

Impossible to keep a landscape in your head.

Try it: all you’ll get is pieces—the sun

emerging from behind the mountain ridge,

smoke coming off the ice on a thawing lake.

It’s as if our heads can’t contain

anything that vast: it just leaks out.

You can be inside a house and still feel

the rooms you’re not in—kitchen below

and attic above, bedroom down the hall—

but you can’t hold onto the sensation

of being both inside the walls

and outside looking at them

at the same time.

Where do we go with that?

Where does that lead us?

There are spaces for living

and spaces for forgetting.

Sometimes they’re the same.

We walk back and forth without a twitch,

popping a beer, gabbing on the phone,

with only the occasional stubbed toe.

The keyhole sees nothing.

Has it always been blind?

It’s like a dream where a voice whispers,

Open your mouth and you do,

but it’s not your mouth anymore

because now you’re all throat,

a tunnel skewered by air.

So you rewind; and this time

when you open wide, you’re standing

outside your skin, looking down

at the damage, leaning in close ...

about to dive back into your body

and then you wake up.

Someone once said: There are no answers,

just interesting questions.

(Which way down? asked the dove,

dropping the olive branch.)

If you think about it,

everything’s inside something else;

everything’s an envelope

inside a package in a case—

and pain knows a way into every crevice.