Latitude

for Lara Trubowitz

It's a kind of rapture.
Light held

in a cloud
of atoms colder

than the spaces
between stars.

*

What season will the first
minutes after

resemble?
Will all the illusions graft

back on? All the nights
and days, insatiable?

(the raft of voices)
Orpheus

and his song.

*

And spring's shaven
black ocean loosens

memory's remote
isotropic hunger

in sudden
downdraft

(a March storm
in cold crossing)

as the last of winter's
incursions

breach and lash
at the vertical-

until summer's
enormous magnetic

fields cull and crest
in alternate, white sails-