Built into a bay window, it extended far out over the bluff,
three sides plate-glass and a glass roof. Below me
sailboats rocked in their slips, lit by the marina’s
thousand lights and beyond them, a dark water stretched
across Puget Sound to a farther darkness.
In the glass roof, stars spun their staggering numbers.
That first night, my ears still ringing
from the plane’s descent, I was dizzy with fear
that once asleep I’d break through to plummet down.
But by the last night, after the hard thing
I’d come to do was done, I‘d learned to love that risky
raft that sailed my sleeping through the middle air,
above the temporal city of sea-edge lights —
below the near-immortal lights of heaven.