Mid-Word
Pent within the radiant
Metal skin of a DC-10,
In flight from one
Life to another,
I stare out a scratched
Plexiglas porthole
To my
Its twilight coming on.
Below, through miles
Of cloudless air,
A freeway cloverleaf
Glitters like a brooch.
Earth, my one and only, dogged
By a moon’s obsessive ebb,
Sweet planet
Of my youth and childhood,
Where’s home?
Out of the depths, a voice:
Huffy Henry hid the
day
From the wrinkled vale
Of my hippocampus,
Memory-room of the brain,
Berryman’s fractured
Voice and nimble-hearted
Music hauled until
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
And empty grows every bed.
No daughter of Mnemosyne, I.
“My mind’s a sieve,”
I’m wont to say.
But hey,
I’m on a roll,
And so to the plane’s
Blinking wing I give
Mister Justice’s “Ode to Yellow,”
(All of it)
Miss Bishop’s “Moose,”
(The start)
Tail end of Whitman’s
Baggy song,
how goes it?
If you want me again look for me under your boot soles.
A pipe, I am, a vassal
Of music, assigned
To Seat ll-A, moving
West to east
Above the continent,
In the vacuity once
deigned God’s.
The flight attendant
Comes by for trash.
The captain’s voice
Announces our descent.
I turn back to my fertile window
And, with brave Jane, choose
“the flashboat!
work,
the starry waters”
As into my lookout
The light-
Studded spines of tall buildings
Slowly rise into view.