Now he’s watching scarves of cloud
slide over the plane’s steel wing.

Surely it’s real, this swirl of light.
But the visions that confront him do not enter his life.

I borrowed my brightness from her. Where is it now?

Memento mori. And just so,
these clouds like lines of coke,
these fine bird-bone clouds
giving structure to the afternoon sky
will decompose into faint nothings.

Down below, that’s not a landfill;
it’s a mirror.

I don’t remember having left the earth. And
yet I must have, for I don’t recognize this