Thirteen thousand up in a steel shell
white-knuckle gripped with wind
The door blade swung,
sucked me toward it,
made me kneel.
I hung off the threshold of nothing
gazed through wide-eyed,
almost wider than the world
colored with the white-capped waves
and striated with clay peaks
the tombs of many venerable and nameless
dead, on the margins,
and beyond, blank endlessness
sliding off the edge.
They shoved me out. I caterwauled
and came to face the blaze above.
It tugged me up, expecting
none of flesh in its domain,
but I, still stuck in time,
was dead weight. So it cast me out
down into burnt land below
who rose, and faulted open.