by the light of a wound

What is this cut––eye of churned earth,
a cyclone pattern, continuance replaced
by some other hand.

How am I seeing, at this height. To look from above
at the place where I might, in another version,
be standing instead.

To learn something from this
—as once, a child, dreaming of flight,
hovered above her mother

in the supermarket’s fluorescent hum,
watched her push the cart
through pale green heads of wrapped iceberg,

bright torpedoes of cucumber
& claw-tied lobsters in their tank.
Between her mother & the ceiling’s light,
she learned distance.

Capillary of shale, piled.
A filament around the iris, worn thin.
Closer down, something else.

A spine. Whose? The engineers arrive
to play king, to play prophet,
to name inheritance into being,

city of gold, encased behind glass.
The glass, compressed sand
the diggers come to move.

They call it dirt. They call it mud.
They handle what little they see,
then leave.