There’s a dusting of snow, a white edge
along each side of that doubling-back
string that may be a road through the mountains.
I know mountains, I recognize them
from 33,000 feet, I know tree cover, but I can’t tell
deciduous or conifer. Too high for that kind
of resolution. I know town: pieces scattered
like bits of stone. There’s an eel that may be
a river, one leg splaying out from his body.
He’s gone, passed below us.
There’s a lake on the side of a mountain.
It’s that flat jade stone laid up against
the straight line of the dam.
Look what we’ve made,
What we’ve done with our material.
We could do better—I intend to—
But still there’s something good
About how we’ve dug into the crust
As if we wanted to stay. It’s home;
We connect our cities like rooms.
We circle what we can’t do without:
The fluer de lis bodies of water.
We draw our matrixes: this street,
this crooked road crossing this other.
This road follows a river as far as it can.
There’s a port fanning its piers, its fingers,
into the water. I can’t see what we’ve done
at the edges. It fogs out; it’s too far to see.
The view nobody has is my face at this window,
this window one eye in the eyes that line
the side of the ship. My eye, me.
Liking the variegated view, liking the light
and the height and the distance,
liking the fact that I don’t yet know
the planet inside, slowly rolling,
don’t yet know what’s turning in me.
Resolving, about to come into view.