Literary Imagination

Swathed in its atmosphere’s radiant organza, my planet turned to face me while my arrow flew over ocean and continent, then quickly, too quickly, plummeted without a chute, freefalling through the cloudy sky cobwebbing my city, my block, my very house, a blue plastic pushpin impaling my roof. Homing-pigeon lost fifty feet from home, my cursor cruised houses and winking blue-eyed swimming pools, reoriented by the tilting tic-tac-toe of red and green roof shingles disintegrating the closer in I zoomed, then vanished into the inky shadows of roofs swallowing the garden’s Japanese maples. When, exactly, did the satellite capture my square patch of house that pieced together with other houses, other patches, made a quilt the size of Earth? Is that dark lozenge parked on the street my car? Am I the shadow in the alley emptying trash, caged under the mimosa? Or am I in bed asleep, or making love, or turning the page of a magazine at the moment that silent eye passed over?