Flight

Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic—

back from bone the echoes stroke, back

from the halved heart, the lungs

three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills.

From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs

dangle, as back they come, sounds

a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape.

The physician cocks his head and taps—exactly

as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock

chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved

and halved, until a roof appears, black as space.

I'm gaining ground, he says, the astronaut,

who knows, from space, earth is just a blue-green glow,

a pilot light he circled once, lifted, swiftly flown

above the rafters and atmospheres, half himself

and half again some metamorphic click,

extinct as memory. I'm gaining ground,

he says, and back it comes, his glint

of cloud-crossed world: a pilot light

or swaddled leaf, green in the season's infancy.