told me. We know enough
to stop and look up, but not one thing
more. They look like manta rays
riding moony ocean waves, like lumens
let loose from a drunken ray gun.
I’m not necessarily convinced by ideas
that have been around so long it seems
their time must have come, but coyotes
do fill the night with tricks when they
throw their voices from bedside lamp
to rising sun, and reincarnation is one
explanation for some kinds of otherwise
inexplicable love. Forever my horse
has thought he is descended from unicorns,
he tells me over and over with the one
brown and one blue lake of his eyes
and doesn’t bat a lash when I tell him
unicorns only ever inhabited brutally
the northernmost seas. He just champs
his bit a little and stamps any nearby puddle
and refuses to blink, as if to say, yeah
well, what’s all that about you and whales
and the scaled digits of your precious thumbs?
On the 2× life-size statue of the saint
beneath the steeple beneath the moon,
the most realistic way to depict the eyes
is the inverse of true: pupils a bolt of stone
and all around them nothing but absence.
THE DISASTER
The disaster ruins everything.
There is no reaching the disaster
this way, the disaster threatens.
The disaster is separate, the disaster
does not come. We suspect the disaster
is thought. To think the disaster,
we are on the edge of disaster
already. When it comes upon us
the disaster is imminence: disaster
detached from the disaster. Time
belongs to the disaster. The disaster
has always already withdrawn,
there is no future for the disaster.
The disaster is perhaps related to
forgetfulness, the disaster not thought—
not knowledge of the disaster,
knowledge disastrously. The disaster
is perhaps passivity. Night, white
sleepless night, such is the disaster,
night lacking darkness, night separated
from star. The disaster exposes us
with respect to the disaster. Nothing
suffices. The disaster would liberate us
if it could. The disaster does not
impose itself. The disaster is not
our affair. The disaster takes care
of everything.
NIGHT PEOPLE
Your legs like a dog’s run in sleep
through made-up meadows.
Every breath borrowed, every breath
owed. We’ve been going about it
the wrong way: kissing with our mouths
full of rings, trying to read the future
in the prism cut of snow. No amount
of calling means someone’s there
not answering on the other end of the line.
No amount of belief or disbelief keeps
the plane from falling from the sky.
All around the world we light up
like stars, like searchlights, like
the map of the earth we actually are.
We talk about talking: this sensor
to that satellite, a ping, a blip,
an uneventful goodnight. We think
about thinking: how distances are
calculated, how long the mind
of a machine might hum. Malaysia
then is everywhere tonight’s meadow
of sleep or no sleep, of dark waves
cradling dreams of flying. Tonight
we are all Malaysia Airlines
as we like to say, as we have learned
to say, as it somehow comforts us
to say. Tonight, this week, for as long as
we can bear it or until something
pulls us away we are all one hundred
and fifty-three Chinese nationals and
six Australians and three
Americans—and it doesn’t feel to us,
and we are very rational girlfriends
who also happen to be scientists,
that they’re gone—and twenty men
who
