Todd Hearon

We've packed our bags, we're set to fly no one knows where, the maps won't do. We're crossing the ocean's nihilistic blue with an unborn infant's opal eye. It has the clarity of earth and sky seen from a spacecraft, once removed, as through an amniotic lens, that groove- lessness of space, the last star by. We have set out to live and die into the interstices of a new nowhere to be or be returning to (a little like an infant's airborne cry). We've set our sights on nothing left to lose and made of loss itself a lullaby.

They are not angels though they have the hollow look of beings bred on ether. There’s an air of cool removal from your life, the hawk’s indifference to the hare’s terror. You see it in their palms, raised casually against the fresco’s surface, as to glass of submarine or spacecraft, and you see it in their eyes, oracular, that let you pass alone to unknown agony. The song they sing is merely time.

Someday our buried life will come to this: a shaft of sunlight touching the Etruscan surfaces, the basin still intact as if awaiting hands. How many centuries sequestered is an expert's guess, you tell me. I admire the tiles some craftsman spiraled in the ceiling's dome detailing Neptune's beard. Or someone's. What will they say of us, who have no home (we like to say) but one another? When they pry our hearts apart and excavate the sum, is that the place we'll lie? Where the words lie?