The Chinese Have Landed
Seventeen below this morning, the moon
over Esther flat and artfully blotched.
We never see the other side of it.
The elongated downcast bearded man
across the aisle stares at, possibly through,
his knees. The woman beside him looks sideways
at her device. She, too, can’t watch TV.
I sit under it so as not to see it.
A woman in a wheelchair, pushed in
by her son, is whisked away at once. Not
to wait in a waiting room arouses
speculations, though no one speculates.
The garble of laughter and comment does
the thinking for us, piped in from somewhere.
Surely, the weather, when they get to it,
will be local, and what’s more, bearable.
Meantime, we have the picture on the wall,
the ceiling tiles, the strange dismal fabric
of the surgically matched furniture.
Across the room, even facing the TV,
the son has dropped his head. Let him sleep.
The glittering efficient inner rooms
await us. The masked proficiency
of everything near the end. The nurses
with homes and mortgages, even tattoos,
hand us off to others like bags of sand
against a rising river, holding back
the tide, or when the bell rings, ease us
down into it. The sun is out there shining.
The Chinese have landed on the moon’s back side.
I can’t wait to hear what it’s like there,
even in Chinese, which I can’t speak,
when for the first time light of a new kind,
our kind, will shine where light never has.