Sleep swims slippery
through this seine of mine tonight,
I reach over to the nightstand
and hold the world in my palm –
even when the world is distant
I seek what is spare,
I seek out the edges.
I click on tiny blue circles
along the lakes and rivers as I move north –
tracing pulsing forget-me-nots in a lonely field:
a woman hikes up a trail with a Husky in Iceland,
the dog eats blueberries.
Wisconsin, Canada, Russia, up and over –
A man jumps off a dock in Alaska,
should the water be that warm?
it’s light, nearly midnight, in Norway.
A toddler on a deck somewhere in Canada
jams three huge plastic Tonka trucks
under his chin and says he is leaving;
the adults laugh, but he is mad.
A man tries to put a bunk bed together,
his girlfriend documents his failure.
Drunk Koreans dance at a club,
swaying close together, in solidarity.
Car after car, highways and dashboards
and roadsides appear
all over the world, ditches
and railings, sliding by.
Pop music plays in
girls’ bedrooms,
and on the screen is scrawled
inspirational sayings:
You Got This
and Wake Up and Be Awesome.
A man on a rooftop
raises a beer
for us.
I lie
on my half
of this raft of a king-sized bed,
floating on this rolling ocean
and peering through the mask of others
across the world –
my paw dipping in and out of this fish tank
where life bubbles and whirs
in plastic castles under the surface,
where they all,
no, where we all
fling open the shutters
before the predatory eyes,
eyes that roam and feast upon the glittering spread,
eyes that eat and eat and eat
and can never be full.
I pause and then I move on
to another snapshot,
another slice,
I move on to
someone else’s story
with an ending
that I can’t see coming.
Halfway North 