Proximal
It’s all day waking,
every step as a tick
of the clock until
your body falls back.
How long until you
approach the meaning
of lone. Have your
ears ever computed
the miles between
dream and dreaming,
between closer and
closed. You and I are
fiercely mundane in
our desire to arrive.
Are we more than
a status of beyond,
longer than the vowed
recurrence of each
heartbeat on loop,
wider than the new
year hovering inside
the wingspan of an
albatross. We are
cosmic promise, a thing
that refuses to be
measured, as not what
we take up, but what
takes up around us,
candid rays touching far
and full the godlight.
Mai Der Vang is the author of Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She is an Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing at Fresno State and teaches in the MFA Program.
