She begins to board the flight
to Albuquerque. Late night.
But stops in the corrugated tunnel,
a space between leaving and staying,
where the night sky catches
her whole life
she has felt like a woman
balancing on a wooden nickel heart
approaching herself from here to
there, Tulsa or New York
with knives or cornmeal.
The last flight someone talked
about how coming from Seattle
the pilot flew a circle
over Mount Saint Helens; she sat
quiet (but had seen the eruption
as the earth beginning
to come apart, as in birth
out of violence).
She watches the yellow lights
of towns below the airplane flicker,
fade and fall backwards. Somewhere,
she dreamed, there is the white bear
moving down from the north, motioning her paws
like a long arctic night, that kind
of circle and the whole world balanced in
between carved of ebony and ice
oh so hard
the clear black nights
like her daughter’s eyes, and the white
bear moon, cupped like an ivory rocking
cradle, tipping back it could go
either way
all darkness
is open to all light.