Dogs take turns shredding apart a sheet of light on the morning of departure. The explorers are inside their homes, waking the way all strangers wake, their arms crooked with the absence they always lived with. Smoke rises down the road from a house where nothing has ever even thought to burn. A baby squeezes its fingers into its father’s skin. The hurt it gives is unfamiliar but the mark it leaves is home.
*
An explorer is packing the trees away because they are not themselves, not sacred, not created to make the space move through them like so many voices, so many voices like blank scarves. The explorer is without and that makes him beautiful. So beautiful his wife packs the image of him away, packs it away like a burning tee-shirt. She folds it into a suitcase along with his old clothes. It doesn’t burn a thing.
*
Boats divide the sea and the sea doesn’t feel it, doesn’t care. There are explorers in the sea floating, measuring buoyancy. They are part of a time that does not imagine time, does not believe in it. The sea is cold and vinyl-colored. The explorers would say it felt as though they were spinning on a giant record on a turntable if they knew what a record was. They slide in the grooves where the needle would run. They can almost feel the music.
{To read more poems in this series, please purchase Issue 39.2.}
Corey Zeller is the author of Man vs. Sky (YesYes Books, 2013) and You and Other Pieces (Civil Coping Mechanisms, forthcoming in 2015).
