Music Beyond Us, Yet Also Ours,

or, A Few Lyrical Whimsies

Light On a Small Planet

or, Yo, Andrew Marvell

Speeding like fast scansion marks
across the tanker-furrowed sea,
surprising windowed Montauk, then sharking
gold-black to Babylon, down the L. I. E.,

then heaping shadows on the Jersey coast,
then Sharon, Cleveland, spreading west
to sear the plains' small water towers,
tree clumps, rest stops, elevators

topped up with grain--they catch it, the badlands,
a desert hollows, brilliant sand—
then it leaps up the Eastern Cascades' wedge--
the first log-trucks move antlike, drenched

with light that has a thousand leagues
to breast stroke on towards Osaka,
the Pacific Rim, the land mass big
against the oceans pounding in,

all chiseled gold and black with cuts
where Mongolia gleams, mountainous,
and threading vales to Samarkand,
light scares up smoke, coffee, and planes

that spiral up and slowly turn
to race the dawn to the Caspian;
and north, south, Palestine awakes in light;
Israeli razor wire bright,

then dawndrenched the leg seam, Italy,
and Spain and north, all Brittany
and London at last post-Brexit, tight,
unkinder, stiff-lipped, white and dry;

and which hurls the light out via Bath
against the cold tides, rocks; at last
scrawled walls in Londonderry gleam
still bullet-pocked and angry, golden,

and far beyond that storm-tossed ledge
light gushes across waves going West
and spotlights the vessels underway
to the blockbuster former colony.