Reentering Atmosphere

Evening’s laddered with ash, jet-line of pale
unraveling silk: primitive web, all axis and latitude. There’s democracy

in entropy. Which is why
there are so many flights all ending in runways, blinking
dotted white lines, a jumpsuited man

wielding an arrow of light. Reassuring,

really, how night chisels the spectrum
to five shades of bone; how even the fly’s

eight-paneled world shutters down
room by room in the spider’s mid-air collision

of geometry and the aesthetics of hunger. If prayers were certain
to be heard, what

gravity they would take—the targeted 
news of the hour, like yesterday’s

civil war in pixels: refugees crouching in a landscape
of sand and static. The pattern’s always been broken by one

off-colored bead signaling

mortality, the true believer. Now 
the space shuttle has landed, earth’s blue marble safely

rattling about one crew member’s dreams. 
Outside the bedroom window, a million newly hatched souls

swarm the streetlamp. It’s still summer, and someone

is out late for a walk. The earth pulls from beneath
the road’s tar strip like swamp mud, quicksand
in a bad movie which nevertheless

made him weep, even back out in the parking lot sun.

First published in The Kenyon Review; republished in Burn