Читать книгу Late Empire - Lisa Olstein - Страница 11

NIGHT PEOPLE

Your legs like a dog’s run in sleep

through made-up meadows.

Every breath borrowed, every breath

owed. We’ve been going about it

the wrong way: kissing with our mouths

full of rings, trying to read the future

in the prism cut of snow. No amount

of calling means someone’s there

not answering on the other end of the line.

No amount of belief or disbelief keeps

the plane from falling from the sky.

All around the world we light up

like stars, like searchlights, like

the map of the earth we actually are.

We talk about talking: this sensor

to that satellite, a ping, a blip,

an uneventful goodnight. We think

about thinking: how distances are

calculated, how long the mind

of a machine might hum. Malaysia

then is everywhere tonight’s meadow

of sleep or no sleep, of dark waves

cradling dreams of flying. Tonight

we are all Malaysia Airlines

as we like to say, as we have learned

to say, as it somehow comforts us

to say. Tonight, this week, for as long as

we can bear it or until something

pulls us away we are all one hundred

and fifty-three Chinese nationals and

six Australians and three

Americans—and it doesn’t feel to us,

and we are very rational girlfriends

who also happen to be scientists,

that they’re gone—and twenty men

who worked for a weapons manufacturer

and the Defense Minister who is also

acting Prime Minister and the mainland

army night watchmen dozing in front of

their radar screens. We are all kissing

something dark tonight, in the dark

tonight, with our words or no words

but we are going about it the wrong way.