Over the rooftops the city’s green horizon
shines through the terrarium on the sill.
My plants flourish in their tropics.
The green smell of weather
is the way life smells, an oasis breathing.
Who navigated the ship into the bottle
or the message in the bottle
that reads ‘rescue’ and ‘island’?
Before my windows I lean out like a figurehead,
against the glass as against a great wind.
In the mind of the island’s one survivor
the rescuer is always sailing, towards
his other self, who swims to meet him.
2
Is the paperweight,
this blizzard in my palm,
my own dream of escape.
Inside, a man splits logs
the width of toothpicks.
Snow falls through the liquid air.
Or the snow has just fallen
and the sky is clear.
A carved backdrop of ‘Swiss Alps’
bleeds a blue stripe
down the careful line of evergreens
and continues melting onto the cottage roof.
Beneath, I imagine, something good is cooking.
Decaled on the kitchen window,
a woman’s face.
Smoke hangs over her tiny chimney
like a parachute that never lands.
Throughout the snowstorm
there is a sunset going on
as the woman watches the child in the sled
whose cap is coated
with the identical blue alp.
A snowstorm is always about to happen.
Here is a country under siege.
The children in the cottage
feel the world tip over,
and with an astronaut’s notion of gravity,
turn over in their beds and dream.
But the child in the sled in the paperweight
is always caught outside
regardless of the weather.
He stares at the sky
that is always collapsing
and sees my magnified lunar face rise,
wishing the light or my hand’s heatwave
would melt the immutable snow.
I stare through the glass an inch away
pressed against the window
like the mother calling to her child.
If only she could unglue her mouth
from the glass
where her breath sticks
like frost on the pane,
if only the sound could leave her mouth
the way a locomotive
shoots from a mountain tunnel,
then the order of their silence
would break with my cry
moving its bat-perfect sonar
through the climate of their sorrow.
Frozen in that lit interior,
who will warn them
when the bad weather will begin.
Who will bring the child in.
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