Bruce Ross

The Other World

Jet-lagged from a trip to Japan— living on Maine time and Japanese time—for two nights reading on a Kindle a favorite thriller writer til 4am. My eyes blur from the dull gray screen. A turned-off tall bedroom lamp becomes a living shadow—I even get up to meet its comments—the bright winter stars through the skylight more and more covered with branches not there—feeling like a cosmic spider web—even the top of a great window the same web . . . the sense of being walled-in . . . the sense of crossing a barrier . . . I remembered in the Stockholm museum the paintings on a spiritual artifact.

Sami shaman's drum
an upside-down man floats up
from a ladder