(Dedicated to John Rawls)

1.

Mighty planet Earth

orbits to order, its greenest blues

attractive, to make our

life-giving aerial envelope

lawful, obedient, singing.

It turns among bodies

of stars and astral junk.

Earth bears with us undismissing.

Enveloped, we hear it thrum.

                   We’re all over it.

We think of Earth as ours. We

were raised here. Its blood-stream

slung in our knotty salted nets,

it seconds the continuous bass

of the pulse of the sphere.

2.

On foot I am in

the fight of my life

facing my enemy.

I duck and fall side-

wise to the commons.

I come up at last.

At last.

A space, a narrow strip an edge:

Tiny, it’s enough.

Quieter, I inch away from the war.

Behind my enemy and behind me, our

landscape, erupted, lies wide, hurt.

Now what. Here I stand (life, here saved).

He too doesn’t fall. (It’s disarming.)

We’re at the edge, his and mine.

Our country is broken.

Broken, it smokes in the sun.

Oh. We’ve reached the common verge. We

overlap on it. We catch our breath and

stop bristling.                      We speak.

I can see him better from here.

We overlap. We word our overlap

forward from our verge.

Air holds us, fond.

Both of us are speaking and

audible on our equal overlap,

both of us Earthlings

under the hugely overlapping sun.