Settling

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 29: Prosper or Perish
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Heather Taylor Johnson

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Heather Taylor Johnson's biography and other articles by this writer

Outside and the blue below,

the forming and vanishing slits of white:

the Pacific Ocean.

Always that moment

deep into the fifth hour

going on the eighth

when a settling has overcome

my upright seated body.

My eyes rest on nothing

but space through the rounded window

and the air is measured into fractions

of slow streams of manufactured

and faster streams of recycled

so the act of breathing

becomes efficient and ultimately sedating:

sleep encouraged,

jet lag a bitch.

Must be heavy, the middle of the ocean,

so thickly seen from such a distance,

the idea of weight and water unsettling

that settling in my bones.

And deep into that liminal space of Home

and home, where definitions interchange

depending on which memory sticks

with momentary greater force,

there is falling,

something slight though real enough

falling in my gut.

I'm thinking hard metal crashing liquid

death and sink but no pain,

my body floating,

the outside inside,

the cabin a wreck of saltwater

and bodies, fodder for fish.

I smile out the window. I settle.

Think that it would be fitting

to be buried somewhere between;

no earth has ever been mine to claim.