Excerpt from Fruitlands

by Kate Colby

Meridian

Turning to
weightless
implements
of gear-click
hedging in

instamatic

blue, our ticking
gaze
in light
like waves,
overturning

A lifeline,
a forerunning wake of life
rafts and instruments,
liminal seconds
in cesium
skimmed threshold
or eleventh hour

draped
across
the doorjamb.

We lack fear of flatness
or our impalement
on axes, blinking
a reticle of stasis;
turn it over and begin
again, this dripping
like TV test patterns.

Let’s stay, I say,
and buoy ourselves
in river locks
intercalated
in channels
or our fender-bent
synapses, recycling

this floating.

Never believing in water torture or autisms as misfortune,
we were counting gold in a pointillistic landscape of radiating
boulevards. In Budapest, a necropolis of shifting foci grid-dots,
Soviet heroes, missing limbs.

The thought does not sadden us,
but the calculation
of sundials;
whether flat or equatorial

they always deliver

this sublimating ice

(we are tapping on the ceiling)

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