i. West Virginia
Only when you look up into the sky in West Virginia
can you perceive the turning, the suspension,
what it is to be inundated and overwhelmed.
You realize
a grand scheme;
you realize
you’re not really a part of it.
Cool black sky, turning down the side of the earth
no matter the interruptions in its vulnerable stillness:
the crack of a gun shot, a car dragging
its weight down 259, the shriek of a cow,
her black baby invisible to her in the thick night.
It rearranges itself in globules, in collections of space
that assemble into a spinning whole, a dome that
could at anytime, in some massive, heaving sigh,
collapse inward on you, head tilted back in this empty
field.
As soon as you close your eyes
with intention,
there is a sinking inward and
downward;
an eclipse of your own outline.
Outward noises are dull
and your ears feel pressured
as if you are diving into deep water
that darkens until there is no
concrete signifier of time or location.
You become unsure if the unbounded
blackness stretching always away from you
is the depth of water or the
breadth of night sky lulling you
toward the assurance of spatial
envelopment.
ii. Wyoming
There is still snow on the Big Horn Mountains in June,
snow up to your thigh, higher in some places,
swallowing you whole if you
misstep.
In the thin air, miles in the sky, each breath you inhale
feels like a surprise, a cold explosion in the throat
that never arrives at your lungs.
The crunching ice, snow, crumbling rock, and dead grass
create a rhythm with each step; any interruption and you
will tumble right off the mountain
into the spikes of evergreens that congregate in the valley.
Blinding blue at the top, and freezing; gravity directed
upward,
the
mountain pushing you from underneath.
A basin full of scrub and snakes spreads out behind the
mountain’s
turned back, ignored by the clouds that gather at its peak.
A sinewy
river cuts across; a curved highway sits perpendicular.
Nothing moves but drifting clouds and your own whirring
body.
It is as if your thoughts are wrapped in watery tulle
that ebbs and expands. The mind visions are shrouded,
each one beyond a layer, a net, that makes it unattainable:
but you do not mind as a shadow closes over each one in turn:
you are an observer: you are the subject:
you weave from one thought to the other as if they were tiny,
remote islands, given only a moment of consideration
before you are pulled back in between them:
light glinting off a river: cucumber tendrils pulling themselves
up a fence: a field of wheat grown above your head,
so that all you can see is the expanse of sky and thin stalks
enveloping you: a portrait of a placid girl in a white hallway:
you realize, as you fade from it, it is not a portrait, but a mirror.
iii. India
Ashen moon nearly full, Shiva’s contented face shrouded by
lavender, slate: its restrained
glow illuminates cloud lace.
So far away from this rooftop, and so far away from the
commotion below: Indian families on
motorcycles,
men in slapping sandals herding their goats to the distant
pond;
women beating their saris dry on
clothes lines as babies stare.
White, vaporous water birds with curved necks dive
incessantly
away from this scene, toward black
trees beneath the silver orb.
Behind you, opposite the moon, the sun sets, orange pink
hues
clinging to cumuli, casting the
bustle below in gold.
Look up at the dusky meeting of day and night; balance
on cosmic schism, caught amongst
the familiar and the ineffable.
Stare into the radiance: the delicate thread of orbital arc;
the filament between consciousness
and dreams.
Before you can attach yourself to anything or any place,
you are gently removed, drifting beyond, in between,
not in space, precisely, nor air or nothingness or ether;
idling in the unnamable, meandering in a vessel with no anchor,
no ear for the ticking away of time, no eye for land until it is simply
there. You turn inward and inward until you coalesce with this
in between and come out of the dream, this centermost state, reshaped.
