Pádraig Ó Tuama tells me the person is prayed into being by the direction of the light. At least, I think he says this, but I’m distracted by the soft breath of H that he pushes out from the click of his tongue while we bake scones in the house of the poem, while we watch the gentle yellow light of the poem glide under our plane’s wing, wondering who lives in the poem, wondering if anyone is looking back. Someone was, it turns out, all the way down there, though they were disappointed when we didn’t turn out to be a satellite.

Pádraig Ó Tuama holds me in the bed of the poem. We draw its blankets around us.  He steeps the poem in boiling rainwater and we sip it before the poem rises blazing into this Oklahoma day, drenching us in its heat, again. Padraig checks the forecast of the poem, clicks his tongue with that delicious H sound and says it’s just more of the same, all the way on out until next Tuesday at least. Padraig says it’s getting expensive, keeping the poem plugged in and running all day long, but what choice do we have? There are not enough box fans in the world to make this work. There isn’t any other way.

Pádraig Ó Tuama and I used to stand at the ledge of the poem and lean forward until we almost tipped.  We’d climb aboard the boxcar of the poem and wait until it started up and the last one to jump off was the winner. How long could we watch the world, without blinking, or dare keep our eyes shut at the wheel – these ways of testing our limits in the world. Once I kept my headlights off long enough to adjust my vision to the moonlight reflecting from the road, which of course is as reflective as the moon, just much smaller. I managed to find my way home almost exactly like a moth. Pádraig Ó Tuama waits until I’m not looking and releases the poems and free from the aviary and they spill into the sky. I can set myself loose into the sky, too. I can become a lost and silver star-shaped graduation balloon, I can land in some abandoned farm place. I can recite there every woman I hurt with these poems. And when Padraig and I watch the bright, arcing streak of the poem-become-comet just one week before impact, I’ll try to yell my own poems at it. And he’ll laugh, and shake his head. No no, I think he’ll say.  You’re still doing it wrong. Everything we say always becomes the air.