Hotei: The Fullness

V.

A sudden smoothness like a glass
between the swells      enchanted valley
wandering the wild sea drifts.
The cloud deer cross the road,

the main shipping lanes,
searching after it      in the snow
it is that master
flake of all possible design

when compared in size, the pin
of the spin of the ocean.
of all migration
The course of the target

only      makes all the objects.

5. You can stand in a field at night and hear the snows land.
The ton of an instant's impacts taken all but one,

and a sea cleared in silence for that star:
the seas of the mirror moon,

that radiant from, say, one crater
taxiing to time as copernicus.

That flake.
That sound.

The beacons, the landing lights strike me as spinal,
as physical shivers

the silence in which this traffic fields
its tar baby.

VI.

there are no stars in
the metropolitan
area skies
only air traffic.

twenty-one landing
lights. call
that mobile
the constellation Holding

Pattern, a modern
form in time
enough to save our navigation
of a maintained

in the nebulaic      escape of bearing from here.

Ed Roberson is assistant director of special programs at Cook College, Rutgers University, and is the author of Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (1994 Iowa Poetry Prize winner). His works include When Thy King Is a Boy, Etai-Eken, Lucid Interval as Integral Music, Just In / Word of Navigational Challenges, and, most recently, Atmospheric Conditions.

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