Transit
by Danielle Cadena Deulen
The horizon is doing my favorite trick, flattening itself
into a blazing line. I’ve been watching the sky from
this plane as the plane burns through it, the dark
streaming behind. It’s an illusion of space and light
I’ve stared at so long now that I’ve become confused.
And not a simple confusion, in which I equal the zenith
of my own perspective and you equal the burning horizon.
You are in the horizon and so am I. I’m also on the plane
and you are nowhere, though several times now, I believed
I heard your voice, turned from the window to look down
the aisle, as if you could possibly be there. Like a dream
I often had in the years after we split—how I followed your
echo through an apartment (that one built like a thin-walled
cinderblock) where the rooms were infinite, filled with
people I didn’t know and your voice steadily disappearing
into the next room. I always arrived late, just in time to see
a glimpse of your heel or elbow slipping around a corner
into nothing, just past a doorway. I never caught you before
I awoke. Between the dream and the years after, I began to
wonder if any of it was real: you, me, the way I could feel
my pulse like a moth in my throat each time you moved
past me. When I blink toward the aisles, I notice a circle
of light obscuring my view (penance for staring too long at
the sun), a transit in negative. Not the astral spot of Venus
across the broad sun, but a bright tiny form on a body so vast
it could be the dark sky itself. It could be the infinite, God’s
Love, as Augustine imagined it in a time before space could be
measured, before we understood that everything is finite, that
everything is only as we perceive it. So, I know that I loved you
from that knowledge alone, though I can no longer feel that heat.
The dark has caught up to the plane and the horizon has burned
itself out. Not even the faint light of a city below, as if we are
flying over nothing into nothing. When I rest my temple against
the glass, I swear I hear the Atlantic shifting below and think of
a water current in the southern hemisphere unbroken by land that
circles the earth. You told me once how a solitary note at certain
depths will echo the same path endlessly, how if I whispered
into that water, my wish would follow its own song of longing
through every ocean, hypnotized by the rhythm of waves, until
someone reached far enough down to lift it into the singular air.
Danielle Cadena Deulen is an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati and has authored two books. Her poetry collection Lovely Asunder (U. of Arkansas Press) won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize and the Utah Book Award. Her memoir The Riots (U. of Georgia Press) won the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the GLCA New Writers Award. Formerly, she was a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.