Taking off, the sound of the engines rasp-knuckling against my skull. We inhale, once, in unison, and then breathe in whispers until it’s done.

*

My wife takes pills, two glasses of wine, buzzing the attendant, nudging me to reach to push the button high up on the ceiling so she doesn’t look so desperate to the onlookers, the other passengers. They look on us, looking forward.

*

Swaying jetway, rickety portal from Chicago to somewhere–anywhere–else. It is filthy with humanity, the small, sad odor of a fish embraced and set free. How can I try to describe what you see? We are

lighted from behind and from a distance unknowable.

*

Coca-colas crack and rear, an almost daily beat of boredom. We cannot close our ears to it. Far below, the river is silting in, lull of soil gently slumping, the bed of cobble cold.

*

In their moral horror, the birds are alone(ish). We peer out into the open, Alp-horn air, strewn with moonlight. A white fig! We are still on a plane. Still in rotation. A crank wrenched at the sound of a bell moves the scene away. Night comes on. There is a stillness, which is the stillness of graves.

 

*

The slightest tidal hum and we go grappling at the crack: hatchet heads leaking like the worm-pipe of a still. The hours haul in wild sea teeth, bat whispers, big-eared moths. We thread them through the masts hitching low on all our brows. Hours recede in self-mutilating defense. A great, wide wake and everyone without feeling now, everyone wrecked at the mouth. Rejoice. Hoist the spine–firm, audacious staff–surrender. Through our throats we breathe alone.

*

My dear passengers, take this map, worry it to your brow and feed the wooden mouth-piece through your lips and breathe. Next morning awake bluntly, wet feathers leaking sweet bluish-pink beneath your head.

*

In my mind I take the string, feel the tug. Sleeves whipping light into smoke, blow my only hands to birds. What becomes of light, stiletto wink of heel, smear of knives across the cocktail trolley, solar

microscopes and wild, lunar rainbows? What of mountains on the moon? My wife deflated, cranking

the clouds into paper bags, her lightest memories retrieved in the crook of her elbow. She sits at the slope of a small window, hushed. There is no future state. The dog skulls are returning from their walk in snow.

*

On softer days we flow through the ice in twos, no sorrower still. A collection of wild

wind-blown animals, this honeysuckle snarl of barbed bramble you, my polar adventurer in the shadow of

a blood-addled sky, return in secret to. All my guilty walls gawk open, send forth pistol-shot of feathered glass. For a gulf of time inconceivable, we are without our eyes alone.