Long after Lauds. Jeanine Hathaway

friends

      what God and she might ask for at this point.

      The blue door bobs to flash a bit of brass,

      a glinting hinge or knob or fish. A swell

      rehangs the door. The lock’s still on.

      The lower panel’s blown, perhaps kicked in,

      or thrown by weather up against a rock,

      flipped over time itself the open frame.

      TIMING

      Late, the swimmer flips from the board into the diving well

      as the Country Kissin’ radio blares: This is the moment

      you’ve been waiting for. Not knowing she was supposed

      to wait, she kicks, sounds, clicks like a beluga.

      Never at home on the surface, she wriggles,

      rubs her cap-knobbed head on the drain grate

      12 feet down. Goggle-eyed, she stretches

      the length of her white body extending back

      epochs when the breathless elders’ stubby legs stumped up

      onto their arctic beach; when lolling in air, blowholes

      sandy, the whole pod flipped and sang till—oh!—the life

      guard blows the whistle. Out of time. She has to return

      to the radio, leaping across stations, picking up sound waves,

      grace notes, off; a fluke then, the unexpected depths of silence,

      another moment she hadn’t known she was waiting for.

      LANDSCAPE OF THE MIND

      Wit-struck, the mind takes a stride off the side of its boat,

      the Tempus Fugit. Don’t look down, says the divemaster.

      Watch the horizon. Eight hours into this twelve-hour drive,

      It’s all horizon, geological forms that undulate, thrust,

      and flatten as they did when this was a nameless stretch