If you, Tom, could see this inflight video map
of the world turning wildly on its axis
you would not, I think, be mad, though it is not
on paper, and that is what you do, but it is
a useful thing to see the earth twisted up like this;
it is our minds that are twisted, and you
are twisted too around a spoon, and drunk, I’m sure
by now, like me, past Newfoundland’s shore
with other peoples’ wine and dotted lines
to Bruxelles where I will only be
to switch planes, but you, I think, first went
there of all the other places you’ve been,
gobbling up the light as you went,
sending presents wrapped in maps.
Copyright © 2013 by Matthew Rohrer. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-a-Day on May 7, 2013.