Flying to

You Can Take it With You
Josephine Jacobsen

2 little girls who live next door
to this house are on their trampoline.
the window is closed, so they are soundless.

the sun slants, it is going away;
but now it hits full on the trampoline
and the small figure on each end.

alternately they fly up to the sun,
fly, and rebound, fly, are shot
up, fly, are shot up up.

one comes down in the lotus
position. the other, outdone,
somersaults in air. their hair

flies too. nothing, nothing, noth
ing can keep keep them down. the air
sucks them up by the hair of their heads.

i know all about what is
happening in this city at just
this moment, every last

grain of dark, i conceive.
but what i see now is
the 2 little girls flung up

flung up, the sun snatch
ing them, their mouths rounded
in gasps. they are there, they fly up.

The other day, I watched two little girls playing with dolls that would, were they rendered women, be too tall and too feeble to survive in a standard setting and gravity. The girls were using these dolls to play a game in which Peter Pan taught Wendy to fly.

That day's (as it were) earthly flight, the trans-Atlantic one, was delayed. These children were creating a space of fantasy and wonder in a corner of a dingy waiting area. In celebration of them, I post three different approaches to escape from this planet's foot-fast hold. Remembering Sue Standing's poem, Artificial Horizon, I again give thanks for good pilots. In all areas of flight and destination, they are the finest of beings. The one who ferried the girls, their parents, other passengers (including one who was unwell), an excellent crew and me got us from departure to arrival intact and unafraid. There are worse things to be said for one's work in any day.

Aerialist
Susan Maxwell

look the snow is like us,
tide-metal bell flung open

to ocean. No farther
says the chamber with trees
filigreed fast to its edges.

Coal-fat in winter, a prayer that burns
when inverted. Oh please
says the fire in the trees.

The story streams

from gull to gull,
each beak a clear carrier,
what happens nowhere

to be found there.
Nowhere to be found.
Overcast gull. Eyes flying

into the noise,
the lead silhouette.


§

27,000 Miles
Albert Goldbarth

These two asleep . . . so indrawn and compact,
like lavish origami animals returned

to slips of paper once again; and then
the paper once again become a string

of pith, a secret that the plant hums to itself . . . .
You see? — so often we envy the grandiose, the way

those small toy things of Leonardo’s want to be
the great, air-conquering and miles-eating

living wings
they’re modeled on. And the bird flight is

amazing: simultaneously strength,
escape, caprice: the Artic tern completes

its trip of nearly 27,000 miles every year;
a swan will frighten bears away

by angry aerial display of flapping wingspan.
But it isn’t all flight; they also

fold; and at night on the water or in the eaves
they package their bodies

into their bodies, smaller, and deeply
smaller yet: migrating a similar distance

in the opposite direction.