It is at this elusive intersurface between wakefulness and slumber that the mind splits into its spectrum—like light on a thin film of oil floating in a roadside puddle. I am that thin film now: my consciousness, volatile as oil, evaporating atom by atom. Yet it holds on, tethered to the last external sentence it encountered.

Science describes accurately from the outside; poetry, from the inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.

The page with that sentence soaks in the oil secreted by my skin, the book hooked on my nose as I drift into this lucid hallucination.

Somewhere above, a satellite circles the Earth exactly as a bee circles a flower in the South African fynbos. I have just seen both in a brief accidental flash—one-twenty-fourth of a second. Their dances so perfectly superimposed that I couldn’t tell which was which. Like the spinning ballerina illusion.

Speaking of ballet—inside the bee’s brain, a neural program blooms to perform a dance that will guide her sisters to the flower. I watch it slowly, as time dilates. Time dilation must also be corrected for in the satellite’s atomic clock because Earth curves time. Curved time vibrates on my wrist. I pause it for ten more minutes—to orbit a spherical flower, and a fragrant globe, in perfect silence.

Recent weeks have been a time of unusual clarity: the mirror-flat surface of a dead sea, yet the sail’s foil is strangely taut. In that clarity, there is space to weave words and worlds—to wake, and celebrate, and to start anew.

And this is how I’ll end today.