Three Poems
Better Halves
Sunrise at thirty thousand feet is a bruise
upon the stratosphere: jet fuel, black and blue,
some red. Funny how, going east, the fastest
route is north. JFK to Incheon, passing
over sleeping bears and narwhal, sunken
Russian battleships, lost explorers' corpses.
And you're struck. You're broken. You've
seen the Perseids: how hunks of rock burn
up like cotton, and you're already halfway
there. These aurora don't show up, and you
wonder if it's a sign. Is it the Australis you
should be looking for? Upside down a map
is equally as accurate. The surface area of
Antarctica is 14.2 million kilometers squared.
The Arctic Ocean: 14.06. They are mirror images.
They fit. Winter Summer opposites like Scorpio
and Orion. What else in this world complements
a better half so well? And you think that's where
the soul might be—in that space where poles
unite, ‘til coming south again, you bend wide
around the DMZ, and when you land you're
confident, until a taxi plants you at some
unknown stoop in Sannam-dong, and
you take out a photo—of everyone
at the dunes in February back in Colorado,
before goodbye, and all tucked in, under the
shadow of the Seoul you chose lay feeling with
your toes your bed: the sheets, the ice, the sand.
Customs
The second farthest place that I have been
from anything that you will ever know is
in love. Like this, I mean. Like how when
condors fledge, they leap from icy cliffs then
fly. They ask: Destination? Purpose? I say, Yes,
I wish to have one. Let's say "South." Ushuaia,
the land of lagooned mountains, turquoise in
the snow. Let's say I have a backup answer, but
we will never hear it because I'll go and I'll be
gone, like how you went, too—became a time
lapse of the clouds over El Chaltén: just some slow
recording on my phone. That was supposed to be
the time of my life. That was supposed to be when
we got closer. What even is the word explore? Flamingoes
in their craning lines, pink perforations in the sky and salt. Ñandu.
Receding glaciers. Perhaps we should just accept climate change
as a liberation of the water. We're its savior, returning it to
its rightful salten home. And who was Magellan,
anyway? There are penguins with his name, but
only in colonial tongues, and I call them that. And
you sent me here to learn what a disaster the world is—
has always been because of men like me. See it
all, you said; and I signed on without considering
the finest print: sure to witness disaster. We'll be
fighting over love and water in our lifetimes.
We'll squander them like years, but
faster. And even when we have
none left, we'll still believe
we have the answers.
Ablation
We are glaciers inching
into the ablation zone.
We will disintegrate,
leave nothing behind but
shale and shaped valleys—
great, these humble places—
hemlocked pools, where
common yellow throats pluck
spiders from their rhythms,
vibrations in their sunlit necks,
masked and singing to whomever's
there to listen. We are the animals.
We are the seeping CAFO runoff.
We are the nutrients feeding algae
blooms, asphyxiating every pond into
which we dive—from which we pull
our youth. We are the water. We hug
the western shore out of Watkins Glenn,
which, ten thousand years ago rested
underneath a block of ice two miles thick.
Two miles 'til the north end of the Y. And
just like the tiger lilies in the ditches lining
14A, I'm a flower much less powerful than
my name. Thunderstorms ride warm fronts like
porpoises leaping at the bow, moving eastward
unabashedly—this air more tropical than what it
used to be. And we melt as we will and tend, and
we do nothing (because we can't) but hope that
somehow this moraine we leave might form a bank
where some kettle lakes fill in: home for bass and
snappers, holding water in its silence, more than
just a hill for all the rest to climb.
