Vancouver to Sydney, Monday 8 May 2012
Dawn breaks for three hours straight along the wing

Of a 747, six thousand miles behind me, two thousand

Miles to go, Pentecost Island like a small light off the tip

Of the port wing.

                                While I lay across three seats impersonating

Sleep, a whole day disappeared; it happens all the time. The sea

Is blue and legioned and steep with days, and it’s fifteen hours

Across. The Pacific is an isobaric book of tides beneath

Me that has swallowed up where I’ve been.

					                                        But as long as my watch

Tells me the time I left behind, I’m still halfway there: midday

Tuesday in Vancouver; five a.m. Wednesday in Sydney; no time

At all where I am, thirty-six thousand feet above Noumea.

You step into an airport near midnight and mountains fall

Away. Everywhere you’ve been, shut like a child’s pop-up

Book, till the next time someone picks it up.

					                                        Your old life

Ahead of you yet, waking without you; you’re a thicket

Of afterthought, swimming home in high cloud.

					                                               But home

Is a fable, too, from this height, and you hang stateless, Aeneas

On a string that no one holds. You’re rowing home high in a medium

As mythic and elegant as Virgilian hexameter.

					                                           Nearing home

Is like remembering the future, and you’re hungry to make it

New this time, truer than how it’s ever run before.

But everything of course—once one lands—

Will be much the way it was.

			                             Nearing home,

You’re a ghost walking out of rehab, stepping back

Into a body you cloaked while your inner life wandered

The peneplain; you’re putting on old clothes now

At thirty thousand feet and trying to stand up in them again.

Dawn’s still breaking hours later, when time starts to remember

Itself. History resumes, the sea resolves to come to an end; you tighten

Your belt and feel the plane relent.

                                                               Home is an island

Below you now, clouds bivouacked along its eastern shore; home

Is a theatre of war in its own aftermath, and an army of other ghosts

Is massed there, waiting for the right wind

                                           to carry them way back out beyond their depth.