Every once in a while, it’s true: I get sick of dying.
Iambic ghosts choiring
their lovely, churchless songs,
All the lines of the poem leaning toward terminus
Like rows of low windbent weeds―
The long vacation laughs
Last summer, Ralph’s reed-dry three-beat wise remarks
Fading fast
As I gaze from the first draft,
a recognition of the dusk,
The last blaze rose holding to my wife’s trellis,
her stone Buddha
Offering its constancy to us,
A hint of musk
Above the blackening daylilies—
***
And so I remind myself of this, then:
Not twenty hyaline seconds
After three rattling slams
Shook Aeromexico 448, northbound for LAX,
After the hard starboard lean,
After the thousand foot drop,
and the next,
After the screams of the mothers finger-vised to their children,
I knew I’d found the earthbound pivot of the poem. Three days back
As I’d begun writing in San Miguel, where I watched
From the high study window,
a single tone
Signaled beyond human ears the instant
The flock of white herons would lift
On a late-morning thermal
as if carrying
The old ascending subject
Over the grey and sandstone homes,
The little white Moorish domes mimicking
the sacristies
Of the town’s Catholic churches. Between that hilltop window
And the serrated spires of La Parochia, the cathedral,
The tall, parched cypress trees
aimed their mortal needs
At an arboreal heaven. As if a message from God
Were tacked on a pennant in the sky, over and over
Every living thing arched upward─
***
As the pilots say, bad chop is the gut-check.
And yet a week ago the flight south
Over the iron-stained desert mountains―
Crossed by that carless road
deadheading
Under splotches of cloud shade―
had known only
The airy sentimentality of silk.
When I woke two hours out of LAX
And peered down
At the pearl-white burled base of cloud
And the gnarling tower rising from it,
I was home again,
As one is home every few months
Or years
In a recurring dream, the few skittering pre-flight nerves
Quieted, and I remembered
This old version of my escape from death—
How I’d tumble into the lush tropical hold
Of the cloud itself, a bed
In which I’d roll weightless, high over the expanse,
held
In the alert omniscient trance of the poem
Inscribing itself across still blue.
***
We all know, such longing extracts a price.
As it happened,
In that house above San Miguel I began this poem
At a desk beneath the famous Magritte print,
All the black-tied businessmen, validated
In long dark coats and bowlers,
―inert, floorless, aloft―
Each briefcase as surreal ballast,
The artist faking infinitude.
Thirty years ago in my journal
I wrote notes for a poem about my sweat-soaked dream of flying,
How I’d soared
in slow-motion acrobatics
Above the tables, above Ralph and the other drinkers,
Above the bartender and the waitresses
Crowded into some sawdust tavern,
happy as gulls
With their lusty crowing, utterly unaware
Of my magic. And, despite my brief weightless joy,
I suddenly knew some clenched maw had spawned the dream—
And, still dreaming,
alone on the unblanketed sheets,
Ruffled, dank, the twisted splotch of my body
Clawed up the walls of bright falling air—
***
This memory, too, came to me in the seconds
our lives returned.
Like Magritte’s floating men,
I prefer to hover,
If only with the smile of the momentarily saved─
How did the fear of falling atomize
into the air of these lines,
As if I’d been tethered to morphine,
Each drip a dream of flight?
A hundred miles
Past the cloud, my wife’s grip dammed blood up my arm.
This evening in the garden, when I told her
How the poem’s new turn came to me instantly,
how I’d burned
Key lines into memory only moments after the air softened,
She said it was a way
Of riding out the panic in silence, the way
I always deal with dying.
I know: All flights─save one─land safely.
Still, for days
After the wind-shear of that storm-dark hammerhead,
I thought I’d worked out a poem
In which a life
Could tear itself from the sky─and then,
as if air were art,
Refuse to fall.
[Ploughshares]