Meridians

at 3-thousand feet 

 

the night was placid and clear

 

the stillness unbroken

 

upon a vast carpet of nautical miles

 

with light airstreams, 

 

the troposphere rippled,

 

enfolding me within its cool nitrogen arms

 

*

 

looking below I saw

 

hills and valleys

 

fields and lakes

 

extending out towards the skyline

 

glancing above, I saw

 

a resplendent planetarium of stars

 

against a fathomless vertical void,

 

whose immensity seemed to expunge

 

the nanoscopic awareness

 

that was myself

 

*

 

levitating lower, 

 

I absorbed sounds from the terrain…

 

cricket, mole, fox and owl,

 

peeped and crooned their refrain 

 

from pasture and branch

 

soaring over a hay meadow,

 

I skirted a cloud of bats, bathing in the compression

 

of their larynx-ultrasound

 

as it wrinkled the air 

 

*

 

climbing at Mach velocities

 

I found myself in the mesopause,

 

staring down at the curvature of the horizon

 

here – at the fringe of space

 

orbiting the zenith between night and day

 

I detected sounds of a different type…

 

sounds that leaked off the planet

 

sounds from super-cities and small townships

 

sounds in Hindi, Mandarin, Navajo and Czech,

 

reverberating in a phonetic calculus

 

that circumfused the globe 

 

to form one collective voice

 

*

 

I heard cries of pain, gasps of joy,

 

hissed curses and soothing assurances:

 

7.2 billion tongues gesticulating

 

in horror, elation and surrender,

 

grappling with the pronouncement 

 

of being alive…

 

speaking to each other

 

to themselves

 

to the immeasurable abyss 

 

through which they hurled

 

*

 

overcome with empathy,

 

a thought suddenly struck me:

 

how did I arrive here

 

upon the edge of the world?

 

what has become of my body?

 

have I died? 

 

is this an afterlife?

 

or was I ever really born?

 

how can I see and hear without eyes and ears,

 

feel and think without a brain?

 

it must be that I am only dreaming

 

and is this moment, 

 

suspended above this exquisite orb, 

 

lamenting its lullaby,

 

only an illusion? 

 

*

 

or might this scene be a line of verse

 

composed by a single self, 

 

reflecting on all that bedlam and magnificence?

 

and if I were to be that poet,

 

how might I sculpt into words some absolution

 

between the tenderness and the terror?

 

what if there weren’t enough similes, 

 

metaphors and locution to articulate

 

this astonishing discordance?

 

*

 

what if, in the end, 

 

the most eloquent language of all

 

was unspoken?

 

enunciated within the margins of a gaze?

 

to look another person in the eye

 

and really find them there…

 

beyond the zoological machinery,

 

to see that they too

 

are falling alongside you

 

through this waking dream

 

imperfect, uncertain

 

half-remembering, half-imagining

 

something more…

 

something on the other side

 

something just past the reach 

 

of our outstretched fingertips