Forms of Flight

I

Departures

An Evening in February

You exit, last daylight orange against shearling collar,
the display window’s incandescent light bright
highlighting by your elbow the arrangements of cartons
behind the Grand Union French Cut Beans sign.
February darkening, you look over and gaze at
the now stunningly tangerine light spread across the sky
behind the frame buildings and bare trees—
and feel the coercion which that radiant clarity
exerts on you and these other shadows
in winter's cave. This radiance is something
you must somehow become. But you also feel it’s
as chilling and sharp as the light of adieux. Yes.
That loved future dream is also the hand that clears away
the chalk of all of your present formulae. You switch stiff
paper bags in your arms, fumble for the stone
cold of keyring in pocket, as you reach the car door. Video
store across thrust-up snowbanks a rectangle, lit, waiting
to be deleted like an unused file at 11:00 p.m.,
titled sic transit night by night pleasures. It’s 1985.
Pass the old clear-glassed Baptist Church (empty now,
the freezer hush in pews, open Thursdays and Saturdays
like history). Then you turn at the light and move out of the village:
the plowed humps keep going on and
on, the headlights keep sliding
off the shapes of snow, the twisted mailboxes, some
with their icicled tongues out; and the road winds
over widening fields, scrub cherry casting its deeper shadow
at the retreating margins. You turn left by the new barn past
marshland, with sleeping moles and muskrats; the crack
of red at the horizon intensifies and narrows; it’s
like a wide screen’s saturated color, unnaturally fiery,
that glows for few micro-seconds after it’s just been turned off.
The breath clouds in front of your mouth,
for here it is February, and you are elevated,
suddenly 30 degrees up by your driveway, lights lift
off tortured gravel into night, drop back
sharp on the sheep fence, suddenly 8 reflections
of reflector orange almond-shaped eyes flash back. The light
sweeps off them then’s gone. A decade ago, you think, all this
farm didn't exist, and exactly so perhaps with the next—so
how can this now be real? How? This place, this strangely
solid transition ground, spot only a little changed by your imprint,
doesn’t it measure this present you and yours
and find it, alas, so brief, and so temporary? Suddenly
shoulder nudging door, the cold air clambers in, and you
get your legs out, slip, right yourself, fling
your eyes up—There! Yes, there! What’s this? This up there
that you now stare so steadily at? It's scrubbed clear; the NW
wind has hosed out the slightest trace of cloud; and the winter
constellations blaze as a kind of limit and fixture
against all excessive haste. And among them you pick
the winking snowberry red and coned white shapes
of jet in landing descent, high in the bare bones of Orion,
porting businessmen from Cleveland, children shuttling
between divorced parents, careerists careening
toward undisclosed ends in that fragile needle
stitching the outlines of the constellation.
You watch the group floating soundlessly
through the galactic ribcage, through Juno's milk,
the abundance of stars expressed from her
swollen breasts. You find yourself thinking
there is change, now, observed and understood, there—
so awesomely beautiful, but is it all that free?
With stiff paper sacs scraping cheeks you stop
before the door and the house heat, sunset’s last afterglow
fading bruise-purple into the cold dark of the snow’s crust;
and time future suddenly shines though that small gorgeous slit,
a stutter of nights still to come, of brilliances, of warmths just ahead.
But you pause, still with the afterimage, still watching
the galaxy’s cluster, still seeing the blinking red lights
of the small bright pod with heterogenous people,
threading its way ambiguously through the stars.

III

Midlife & Mid-Atlantic

Mid Atlantic, Below

IV

Time Passes

The Pandemic Arrives

Tonight there appears
A risen moon that’s altered
Every pocket of sky
Into a huge
Empty theatre, empty now of every
Manmade object, save satellites,
As it plays now by the new rules
Of the pandemic
And no commercial aircraft
With red winking warning
Lights and a hint
Of cabin illumination slide
Slow across this new
Diffusion of phosphoric light.
But as you watch there appears
From low on the skyscape, stage
Right front, entering
With strangely deliberate motion, one
Single jet, though so high
It’s completely silent.

And ascending it extends
And extends its contrail precisely,
In a ruler-straight line;
And, far below, you find
Yourself imagining a young
Person its pilot, be it either
Man or woman, a trainee from the Air

Force Base out on a solo
Night flight for training:
An exercise, that he or she clearly
Is now ex-
ceeding by extending
Far out of the husk of its
Predesign, his/her jet
Perhaps shuddering, shaking
With sound, like coins in a
Can, a howl
Of the wind shrieking,
As fingers of loud air
Try to pry the plexiglass
Canopy loose.

And the young person
Inside still keeps
The climb on its
Perfect angle up.
And as the jet claws higher and higher
You think you see the exact
Moment when all this excess
Molts and changes
Into a new state, all of its own.
For it seems she or he
Must feel like an inverted diver
Plunging, free. up in the depths
Of the sky.

For now it seems more than
Than just flying,
Up out of the machinery
Of imprisonment
Into the infrastructure of light
From the stars and the reflecting
Mass of the Moon’s rock;
For soon the moment comes
Where you’re absolutely certain
That the young pilot sees
Into the grandeur
Of everything shining
With a near-Hallelujah of sight.
And you realize he/she
Is heading straight for it.

And you know now the torch
Your generation has carried
Has burned to an ember
And is now in that cabin
Where the young pilot makes a decision
As incalculable as it is definite
To suddenly take
All of the profits of radiance
She/he accrued in the climb
And spend them at once

on a wild, wild
Tilt of the plane, exposing its vulnerable
Belly to the moon—and then suddenly

Doubling its speed as it
Swings on a wide sweep,
And sails free and soars with only its contrail
Collecting the phosphoric brilliance
Of what she/he did not reach
Nor ever would—yet

found the wisdom to celebrate again and again—
And you find yourself gladdened
As you sit in your sheltering darkness
Glad of the passage
Of radiance heartfelt though
Never sufficient
Into the world where the children
Are now in the lead, whatever may happen.

V

Last Flights; or, The Low and the Relatively Weak

A section honoring John Wayne’s inspirational classic 1954 film (The High and the Mighty)

and the influence it has had, not just on the Anglophone portion of our species (as is perhaps known), but on a variety

of others as well.

From the highest of flight paths
At dawn returning
Now grounded in sunlight
After hours of soaring.

For touching down with a single
Contact with rock, and settling in soil,
This shell sits unmoving
While, inside it, in its aisles

The cleaners and detailers
Go to work with their vacuums
Along seat rows
All at attention.

They refill the galleys,
Scrub clean the cockpit,
And finish up just at
The appearance of twilight

That snakes through the woods.
Then the portholes start glowing
And a pilot and flight crew
Appear on a host of legs out of the bush.

They’re in the sharpest of uniforms;
Carapaced and chatting and laughing
While a real dreamboat, one of them,
Mouthparts in shadow but stunningly handsome

Whistles a tune of consummate sadness
Of grief for his four hundred newly-hatched children
And the gorgeous wife lost in
A crash in his past which

Erased hope forever from him. At the same time though,
It increases his charisma
And made him still more of a hunk and
A prize catch if awakened

By someone new to love’s passion:
For that would be a story of epic
Proportions for centuries thereafter
For viewers to sigh with

Throughout countless screenings.
And a whole cohort of impressionable aphids
Swoons in a group as
He limps his way past them

All the while softly whistling
That enchantingly lonely
And melancholic heart song.
And so they all climb

One way or another
Into the vehicle
In which one engine then another
Coughs into life and

Lights pierce through the sides of it
Through oval windows
Before never noticed by anyone;
Quite strange this,

Though things stranger still
Occasionally occur here
Thanks to (at night)
The forest’s enchantments.

And the craft begins trembling
On the forest floor; and then
With a hitch the whole the thing
Starts to lift into motion,

And begins its slow shudder
Across several downed tree trunks
Forward to the trail that
Leads to a crack in the sky

That the passengers had seen before then
With all sorts of eyeballs
But did not understand
Save as the the space that

Lit and then darkened the real world
Of interesting undergrowth
Everywhere around them. And now with hearts
Up in their mouthparts

Their vehicle shaking, their
Romantic thoughts still filled with the co-
Pilot’s soft whistling, the
Whole entourage feels a totally strange

Hitch in what holds them
A second that stuns them
As the vibration lessens
And the totally wonderful, and

Novel sensation
Of liftoff starts flowing into their bodies
Seats at attention
At the angle for climbing

And they feel themselves rising
Free of the forest
That had for lifetimes held them
Now sailing in exultation

Out into a world made of nothing but air.
Now they know what the gnats say
And mosquitoes and mayflies
Of the glorious sensations and

Freedom in flying,
just when a breeze might
Collect in their underwings
Or some change in pressure

Uplift a whole swarm’s
Small grateful bodies,
Out of some swampland
And over a meadow

Which often happens,
Like now, just at darkness
And feels like a groundswell
From far off in the ocean

That, sweeping in, levitates fishes,
A metaphor that never meant
Much to these insects
But which they can imagine now.

And with a shudder the fuselage
Lifts up in the moonlight
For hours of soaring
Through it and the galaxy’s

Bee-swarm of the stars, which
They only now know they are part of;
And the starlight condensing
On the wings and the cockpit

Makes some of the young ones
Need to be hugged by
Their deeply moved elders
Tightly in a forest of numerous arms.

For the tiny things gaze out
Into space they’d not guessed at,
Space that is vast and incredibly radiant
Beyond their wildest and most extreme

Suppositions. It is an experience
Intense and painful
A shredding of everything
They’ve been accustomed to:

And they see it with eyes
That the creator had crafted
From thousands of facets,
And each facet now tops out,

And the signals that sizzle in
Through their nerves wholly surpass what
Their minuscule brains
Can successfully integrate.

From this sheen of sheer wonder
They then turn; and, thank god, still in the expert
Hands of the pilot and especially copilot,
They manage to head back to the place of their takeoff,

Until (oh so tiny, a pinprick in the darkness)
It twinkles under their wingtips
Where the jets’ pods quiver like small fruit.
Then the pinprick zooms in and they are upon it,

And there’s a crunch, jolt, much bumping and sharp halt,
And then, dizzily, they stand up
To file through the fuselage
Still dazed with the sights that

Burn in their memories,
And are fused with the passions they feel for the heartthrob
As he limps past them, sadly whistling;
For they would each totally sacrifice

Their fortunes and good names
And their health and their futures
For just one press of proboscis
And caress of those features.

At the approach of the dawn
On the hunk of a planet
Stuccoed with mountains
And forests, and oceans all rolling

In an always unlikely
Part of a star mass, they
Feel just how amazing their lives are
In so great a darkness.



Coda
In which the fear of possibly never again
Experiencing such fullness is addressed by the author.

For all of us who live here
With lives like a journey
(As brief as an eye blink):
Deep sleep is our runway.

finis