Tonight the harbor melted 
into seamless bands of rose and gold 
that only deepened
until dusk snuffed the light. 
In the water, a duck clan 
muddled in the gentle waves,
honking quietly among themselves,
diving occasionally for food, 
getting into each other’s
end-of-day business.
 
You had a meeting, so 
I took my camera,
shared the moment with a solitary looker
across the lawn at dock’s end,
a dark silhouette against the rose,
just us and the ducks,
each alone in the joined world.
 
Who knows if animals see
that kind of beauty, 
fly up because the color begs for them,
because they cannot refuse it, 
because the sky demands they accept, 
like me and my full, lonely heart.
                        

“A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point 
where heaven and earth meet.” (Prothero 43)
 
Charlene knows where they meet:
on a bird’s wing where feathers control the wind;
in the leaf that greens after being kissed by the sun;
in the neutrinos that flow through our bodies, unstoppable;
in the notes that float from the saxophone and into the ripe air. 
 
Or maybe it’s heaven and Edith, 
as she thought when she glanced at the quote a minute ago,
in which case, the answer is 44th and Lexington
flattened by a taxi on an icy winter afternoon in 1993. 
 
Or maybe it’s heaving Edith, 
in which case it’s the Hudson River 
on a February night after the moon set
because she’d defaulted on her gambling debts.
 
Or maybe Edith isn’t really the problem here
and it’s Hugh and earth, 
in which case it’s gravediggers
chopping at the half-frozen ground. 

Whatever the answer, 
star dust, fairy dust, bone dust, 
the dust of frozen and discarded dreams
lingers; it’s so much debris that even now, 
as the birds and notes float by, 
the earth might be rounding into a ball.
                        

why someone needs to write a book
explaining the world isn’t 
flat. Why it’s necessary to advise
people to fly or watch ships
disappearing over the horizon
to understand our spherical home.
Didn’t we learn this in eighth grade science, 
right after we dissected our pathetic frogs 
and before we looked through the school’s
telescope at the North Star?

She knows about fear:
the wind rushing off the Atlantic,
wrenching tree branches and flinging
them at windows; about how death 
takes you cell by cell 
until the body gives up. 

The Flat Earth won’t save us,
even if for a few moments we’ve found a home
with like-minded others. Round or flat,
we all fall into infinity eventually, 
like the dinosaurs,
and sooner if an asteroid smashes 
into us or the sea rises or our car plows 
over the edge into the abyss.