Surveillance Poem by Meghan O'Rourke

You look up from a mind of men chasing a whale
through an ocean of type: summer, an ambulance stopped
by a VW station wagon, a couple slumped beside it.
It is silent here, with stars, and all the old pure things that watched over us.
It would take so much money to furnish my house,
to be free and clear and somehow small, yet modern.
Some weeks I barely leave, despite all there is to see.
On the couch I eat a scone: too sweet and cheap.
Large animals swish in the grasses.
The planes disappear into the dark velvet ocean.
Once, I went to the top of a mountain to find myself.
It was cold and beautiful, the firs fringed. Later I came down.
As a child I studied the Bermuda Triangle, where planes disappeared.
The commenters were arguing about authenticity.
It was probably a hoax, all that talk of secret magnets.
Are you watching me? The savannah is dark and large and pure of,
I mean never beyond itself, the way we are in cities.
On the radio, a woman enunciating carefully, says,
air power not air force. I watch
myself watching; I clean the dirt from my fingernails.
When you are young you think regalia, you think glowworm,
firefly, mountaintop, you watch and for once you see.
An incidental resemblance, a person you might have been.
Time for the sun-screen, time to go out.
What disturbs me, honestly, is how much my own mind
(the person who once climbed the mountain with another person)
I don't speak to anymore and almost cannot imagine.