from my unpublished second collection

Mercator

On the map on the airplane’s monitor, the plane is an ark ship the size of a country. It’s the size of a moon, but a thousand miles from the Earth, so close it should be tearing it apart. The bell curve of night has fallen over Istanbul. The Earth is flat. You’ve skirted the tip of Greenland, the Arctic Ice Wall to the north, that keeps the oceans from flowing into outer space, to be here now. The engines are white noise deliberately designed to blot out the hymns of Heaven. Zhuangzi, did you actually believe that you might be a butterfly dreaming that it is a man? Is the koan worthless now that we can scan that insect’s brain and prove it neither dreams, nor really even thinks at all? You lower the window blinds as instructed: sleepers with their sleep masks on, the glass that makes the Earth seemed curved, double hidden. The plane rocks like a berth at sea, a cradle. Rows of humans in chrysalis. You too, in deep, dreamless sleep. Bio machines taking toxins out, moving nutrients around, breaking them down, feeding organs, cells. Intelligent. You’re an insect on a succulent long green stem, your consciousness spreading out to sea, past the Wall, the vacuum. On the monitor: local time at destination, time where you are, time at the place of departure, the same. The Destination is the same, its names scrolling by in languages as uncountable as the worlds.

originally published in Boulevard