Then it floats down into the middle distance.

For the hands to do something about. Or the head. 
Now, it could be seen at the neighbours’,

or in your bathroom mirror. Now,

you could dress yourself in it,

have your hair cut in its shape. Now,

it could be tasted

in meat and lollies and good cigarettes. 
。
By the time they are young, it has deepened

into the bright rust of days getting started

and of the purple sunsets burning through their haze. 
People are learning English.

People are flying away. 
For it now has to be traversed to some

particular marked distance, or summoned down

with C.D. players and two room apartments.

He goes out, one morning, to buy a jacket he thinks is

American. An hour later, he consults

with a travel agent. What he wants? 

Presumably,

is what everyone wants. 
What his bunkmate at university had wanted

so badly he started

to rave one afternoon about his heart,

who pushed past, wide-eyed stumbling down corridors,

before he jumped out of the tenth floor window of the girls’

dormitory, taking with him

two pots of chrysanthemum. 
He buys a car and drives, with friends,

to a neighbouring city, where they eat as a group

down stalls in the street, attend a local fair, where they fall

through smoke and the shimmer

of lights blinking out of plastic. It feels, he thinks,

like it should. When they drive back, taking turns,

he picks up a pebble by a river. 
。
Does he marry?

Yes, of course. First, a hotpot: the steam

opening rivulets between them, through which

to see each other. Then a large wedding.

The small good hotels do it – just as well. 
Do they love each other? 

How can you ask that?

How can you know?               You know. 
It is now everywhere.

The street carter he has seen everyday for two years

opens up a second cart with his sister’s cousin behind it.

Bicycles are traded for choking scooters. The woman in the

nail salon owns a car dealership. The man hammering

at drain pipes now makes plastic bags,

out of a factory – his. 
Everyone. It is said. Must hide from

or trick it.
。
They buy an apartment, two bedrooms.

He visits his Elders, with a bottle of spirits, a mobile phone

for their sons and relatives – to take to the men who are

in the work of living up to it, with their hands on their knees…

He has a new job that September in the field

of Science and Technology Development. 
。
A child gurgling in the cot is theirs.

Who drinks foreign milk powder, plays with toys

from other places. Receives trinkets from friends and family and

fellow workers. Who is out one day,

playing in snow. He slips

on the ice and goes rolling down a gutter. And loses,

from then,

the feeling in his right hand. 
Nothing is perfect,

on the road to the Prospect. 
。
It drives a wedge between them,

before their journey has really gotten started.

Yet his up-and-up is managed by distance

of: Father’s sundering face and the Talk. The old

world fits like a glove onto the Present. The fluorescence

of school hums in the grey dawn,

for the sun will uplift, the heaviness of knowledge

will grow: departures. 
He is now elsewhere? He looks up 
at blue sky and green grass. In between, the prospect

of a large house, bought. Dad

will show up for oysters and crawfish and grain-fed beef,

a tour of the sights and a Talk, about the Catholic school

with the hockey pitch. Dad regrets

Son cannot play music. 
。
But does he become his father?        
                                                                                  ~
He’s in a capsule,

cutting windward three hundred kilometres fast,

on his way, to a restaurant, a shopping mall, a glass tower.

He has beads on his wrists. He wears sneakers. From his phone,

he looks out of his window,

at the warping hills, now coming into focus this half-an-hour.

He sees a village barely stirring out of the trees. He was told,

as a child, about his forebears digging in a dirt like this. Will

the Prospect rocket him, as far as to Mars?

And, what is out there? he thinks.