Long Distance

So now you sit with a black eye 
by a glass wall on the sixteenth floor. 
Already I see our talk in paragraphs 
I can’t read, topics in the margin, 
one clear sentence about clutter. 

You didn’t warrant the bruised eye 
that gazes out the glass wall. 
Through it loom the fortresses 
of the world’s only true church, 
remarkably outside your north window. 

The west window reaches the silver lake, 
the mountains, and planes plotting 
their patterns like a squadron of gulls. 
My hand rose to encircle as you cross 
examined a poem, a lawyer knowing the answers. 

Later, alone, I find it again in my hand: 
here, the black eye and the head-on shot 
no one can dodge; over there, horizon, 
open as a hand curled around a moment; 
only a breath beyond glass, the sky.