after John Ashbery

Nothing is wide open
in the Book of Unusable Minutes.
The sun lifted its broken arms
like a dying thing, the center
moving along time’s cargo
archaic gauze, each individuated
perpendicularity a mazed
patchwork of vein
where healing had words
to unpick and kept its mouth
shut, a genteel child in the cabin –

Long haul. Year of trillions
and the plane soaring
into its wilding airscape, the farther-out
distances of carbon – This
is my airborne home, I cannot
outrun it, these, our eyes
focusing downward
where God is just
this once, yes, the origin
of interiority from our lungs