Poseidon swam to the surface of the ice cold sea, stirring up waves, lapping the rusty sides
of an oil tanker chugging across the North Pacific. I was on my way home to where I had no
home, dreams digging deeper in a South African cave that has already yielded surprises from
the Middle Stone Age, archaeologists have uncovered a 100,000-year-old workshop holding the
tools and ingredients with which early modern humans apparently mixed some of the first known
paint fading into the pitch-black night, beyond my tiny room—

Night is loud
                 whines,
    and knocking steam
                           in pipes.
Stars roll
          into porthole view,
then everything’s black
again.