Articles/Essays – Volume 42, No. 1
Flying Out
This morning makes no shadow, compresses
with its grayness and that knot
I learned to grow against winter
long ago in Wyoming.
A few sweeps of green
lap at the white altitudes of the Rockies.
Mountain ranges flow like ice streams.
Nothing beneath me looks random,
though I am told all seeming stillness
and order are chaos, the silence below
filled with sound we don’t hear.
I wake from a doze
having dreamt something
about cellos and white birds
which leaves me on the verge of tune,
humming . . . the mind lightnings to places
immense and secluded, but specific
as electrons of our cells
once inside a star.
Last week my daughter, the mathematician,
told me each breath we take
contains some particle from that first one
we took. Exotic bodies of animals
drew close, what we need to breathe
hooked to common respirations.
Someone waits for me now, miles
yet just minutes ahead.
We’ll meet at the gate after landing
and everything for those moments
will turn significant—a hint of music
in a collision of particles. . . .
And I remember one afternoon alone
when breathing came suddenly painful:
a strange torment in the need
to inhale. Senses dilated
to a higher power. . . .
Then it was gone—and like so much
of living, never explained in the body memory,
the bellows-hymn of the lungs.