For a little while now I’ve only been able to sleep

by thinking my way into dreams of total freefall.

I start with an Earth a dome below, bluer

than I know how to picture, horizons lenses

like lemniscates, curved impossibly. I’m so high up

there’s nothing to signal my fall, yet, which happens

at first like a slow, swaying, sink through liquid

light, or a sac of amniotic fluid.

Then I blister past an aeroplane

in which I sit behind the wing watching

me blink through flocks of swallows and condors, cities

picking themselves together, horrent, taller

now, more total, and I’m suddenly not in a dream,

and my dataless core gets loosed all over the pavement.