Falling feels like slingshotting your body from metal birds
At colored patches, verdant, oceanic, supposed Earth
That comes so slowly towards you, at fifteen thousand feet
That falling feels like flying then, like floating,
Like dirt is fiction and what you know are only facts

Fact: your eyes were never made to be binoculars
You can’t make them focus on something so far away,
Can’t make them telegraph up the brainwires,
Shouting incomprehensibly about fear

It’s too far. They won’t do it. Sky divers call this distance illusion.
I call it sanity when an ending comes howling across the sightline,
Unavoidable, solid, unfeared
Inside your head is the lie that you aren’t really that far,
That this distance is tame space,
That you are impossible and airborne

the sidewalks are lit up,
sunbright, enough to look away,
into merciful shade

I keep thinking I oughta be using
this time to say goodbye,
soak in Santa Fe, burn with her

if this is my last home
if this is the summer of loss,
I should let it sink under my skin

but I dry out in the sun,
and browning isn't appealing
when I'm outside myself,
beside myself already

Loginquitas*:
distance remoteness isolation;
separated from others.

No specification about how it is,
what it is,
if it comes as a wall between
or only a space, unrightfully empty.

Isolation indicates past ongoing,
a thing not just temporary,
but potentially permanent,
a sentence like prison solitary,
like a state of celibacy,
a vow of silence given under duress.

Remoteness means far away,
not just a length of earth -
an Everest of longing,
ice shifting underfoot and when the footing goes,
down another interminable edge,
there the freeze into narrow sleep.

Distance like roads in the Midwest,
seeing for hundreds of miles,
the knowing discomfort, the steady hunger,
a fact that is this:
lost, interminably lost, losted after.

Separated from others is the afterthought,
the side effect, the symptom-sick,
visible, wriggling nakedly.
Worm-like, burrowed into itself.

Sky soft-curling on the lines that matter, pale slicing down,
I find my front door and try the key.
Until I get it right, breath blown out relief powered, quiet though, because they're asleep.

These boys here, speaking branching words meant to welcome. The girlfriend, her name slanting from my reach.

I lock the door. Keys crush, hushed, silent in hand against the dark, the questioning downgoing, the black stairs. Downstairs finally my door is solid, wooden, and the doorknob slivers sound into the empty when I go in.

Still. Sound is my breath, heavy in my throat. Hungering for unquiet lungs.

Light raps at my window and I beg a reprieve, tongue my lip where I cut it coppery and accidental.
If I fall asleep now I dream up lost, loved, longed after, but if I don't sleep I won't find it at all, not here.

So my eyes go ticking down, languid. Light looks on.

The wicker chair on the porch
it’s bent
the leg that is
bent sort of brokenly in
which reminds her of
inversions,
how they turned in
and found darkness,
ineffability,
space.

in two days there will be eight -
no. nine children spilling in
and out
back in again.

maybe they’ll build a snowman
in our backyard, this yard
that is our own we have it
we claim it we want it
it’s ours alright

in two days the snow might have
melted. gone. vanished.
in two days we’ll see
our house full
of people, my people,
not really our people
not really mine

I did leave them.
they were mine, though
back then when there wasn’t any our
no our house our yard our life
family, this one, ours.

back then I yelled
washed dressed
hugged ignored
tugged at

fit into the sum total
fact of ten children,
two parents,
assorted pets,
God.