Flying at dawn on the Eastern Seaboard

Some want from lovers what I want from big machines
violent ones, loud enough to kill me, during takeoff
“fuck me up,” then “not really,” then
“just scare me”—

The white barn in the field
looking rural, out-of-place
holds tractors for the airport, I guess
but looking at it, rising from the runway, I think
of myself approaching it, grass dew on my boots
beginning a dirt-scented day filled with sky

I awake and the clouds are a soft floor just beneath us even though it might be hundreds of feet and then it drops away to endless empty space and rumpled ground twenty thousand feet below us and even though it was only my gaze that screaming plummeted to its death in that moment, I am suddenly and viscerally aware of this frail curtain between myself and death: a cloth so thin I can peer through it.

I awake and the sun is slipping over mountains and winking back at me very brightly from some large flat object in the distance that can only be a cliff: the buildings everywhere else are dwarfed by its huge reflecting surface. Later I see cliffs in a snaking string along the path of some river whose name I’ll never know, every one bursting with sunlight.

I am awake and the sun has risen almost everywhere now except for the western sides of mountains, where it is still early dawn and the light has not made it over that nearby steep horizon. It is beautiful and it happens every day, it has been happening and will for thousands of years, long after the ground has forgotten these little farmhouses still waiting in delay for sunrise.

I am awake and the sun is inflaming towering columns of smoke from factories, four fetuses in a row rising from the floor to spread out and dissipate and never even approach their grand sky brothers drifting past. I see this from above them all, looking down, and then I look up and there are more clouds above us too.

I am awake and suddenly aware again that every wave of light to meet my eye does so to complete a journey unimaginable in length: from the depths of space to that brilliant shining lake and then—as nothing, as if it were nothing at all—back up through lethal empty atmosphere, piercing airplane glass to find me. Any part of which would kill me; would kill any of us; all beyond our frail and mortal shells, is light.

Sometimes I push forward with a terrific roar
slipping from my seat, held back
only by a belt or grip I keep:
invisible forces thrusting me onward.
We try not to ask
what if this life slipping behind me
runs out of room to land?

There are secret paths amid the trees
patterns in the field you only see from air
idly I wonder where they lead
what caused them, was something there
but once aground they vanish from my mind.



10/27/23