Your legs like a dog’s run
in sleep through made-up meadows.
Every breath borrowed, every breath
owed. We’ve been going about it
the wrong way: kissing with our mouths
full of rings, trying to read the future
in the prism cut of snow. No amount
of calling means someone’s there
not answering on the other end of the line.
No amount of belief or disbelief keeps
the plane from falling from the sky.
All around the world we light up
like stars, like search lights, like
the map of the earth we actually are.
We talk about talking: this sensor
to that satellite, a ping, a blip,
an uneventful goodnight. We think
about thinking: how distances are
calculated, how long the mind
of a machine might hum. Malaysia
then is everywhere tonight’s meadow
of sleep or no sleep, of dark waves
cradling dreams of flying. Tonight
we are all Malaysian Airlines
as we like to say, as we have learned
to say, as it somehow comforts us
to say. Tonight, this week, for as long as
we can bear it or until something
pulls us away we are all one hundred
and fifty-two Chinese nationals
and three Australians and two
Americans—and it doesn’t feel to us,
and we are very rational girlfriends
who also happen to be scientists,
that they’re gone—and twenty men
who worked for a weapons manufacturer
and the Defense Minister who is also
acting Prime Minister and the mainland
army night watchmen dozing in front of
their radar screens. We are all kissing
something dark tonight, in the dark
tonight, with our words or no words
but we are going about it the wrong way.
