Sostenuto
Night. Or what
they have of it at altitude
like this, and filtered
air, what was
in my lungs just an hour ago is now
in yours,
there’s only so much air to go
around. They’re making
more people, my father would say,
but nobody’s making more land.
When my daughters
were little and played in their bath,
they invented a game whose logic
largely escaped me —
something to do with the
disposition
of bubbles and plastic ducks — until
I asked them what they called it. They
were two and four. The game
was Oil Spill.
Keeping the ducks alive, I think,
was what you were supposed to
contrive, as long
as you could make it last. Up here
in borrowed air,
in borrowed bits of heat, in costly
cubic feet of steerage we’re
a long
held note, as when the choir would seem
to be more
than human breath could manage. In
the third age, says the story, they
divided up the earth. And that was when
the goddess turned away from them.
2021-01-18 23:11:54
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