A simple forecast: A morning mist blocking sun rise. The airplane
climbs through layer after layer of cloud—thick, thin, it's all the same, a
          movie played forward then backward,
a repetition except for the light—thick with gray, then thin with
a blue hue to make us believe it's all temporal, that true
nature is the sun's glow, its shine in blackest eyes, in the
darkest clouds.
But not here, not now, where the third layer of cloud is so wispy
that its top is fraying strands of vapor that cluster into
nameable shapes even though regularity is the anomaly, like asymmetrical
          rhyme in a sonnet—
Look: ballet dancers, posing, an entire choreography at altitude
seven thousand feet and climbing.
And there: knights jousting; see the headless one who lost but keeps
          riding, keeps pretending the contest is still on
and here: a statue, a lady sculpted of gossamer to take away one's breath,
one of those Ah Moments
 
until the flight attendant with the refreshment cart says
          decaf or regular?
cadenced speech, cordiality so rehearse it seems
sincere—
like art
like artifice
Like Andy Warhol pretending to be Jackson Pollack who
wanted to be anyone other than himself and Norman Rockwell—One of
          these three so afraid of flying they would cross the street if they
          saw Erica Jong on the sidewalk.
After the fifth layer of cloud with more above, the air for a few thousand
          feet grows almost day-bright, a faint white and yellow to the east,
          where we fly:
Cincinnati to Hartford, a short, business hop, no romantic, no exotic
          destination, as hum-drum as mowing the lawn
          while the plane cuts clouds, from gray to grayer.
I could apologize for such mundaneness, but would it do any good,
as if the question of goodness was still operant in the language, in the
          heart
and not merely in the scent of perspiration in the cabin—novice flyers—
          their secret death wishes, as if that would do anyone any good.
 
But I realize I've been watching

          … my window seat's above the wing's forward edge, where the
                    engine pod hangs in a miracle called physics and
                    engineering, a favored seat for those who suffer motion
                    sickness—the pitch equals yaw exactly here— so I would be
                    first to see the large, hapless bird sucked into the jet's
                    turbines just before the explosion,

          or I could slowly count the mounting bolts loosening, ( one … two
                    … three… ) before they fly off into their own story, until the
                    engine, itself, drops, and I want to shout—

          —but it does no one any good, so the scenario continues:

          I would never tell the attendants about the bolts because we all
                    know the ensuing panic would make things worse, so that,
                    in this case,


          Ignorance is Bliss,
          as long as one of us is aware and can whisper a prayer, or maybe
          the Dickinson poem that begins “Success is counted sweetest”
          as the plane starts its short, axial roll that leads to the fateful,
          downward spiral as cups and saucers, pens and cell phones,
          laptops and pillows fly through the tightening air that the cabin has become,
          an anarchy that can only be assuaged by reciting stanza II of
          “The Hollow Men” either before or after you say something sweet
                    to the stranger next to you who forgot to keep the seat belt
                    buckled and is already become one with the loose flotsam…

But I'm really watching the next layer of cloud advancing in
reflection in the deep, deep blue of the engine cowl and
the same for the next three layers as darkness, again, dominates.
So I'm not studying clouds, themselves, but their mirrors, a once-removed
          reality, akin to marrying a Catholic cousin, as if that could do the
          gene pool any good.
And somewhere over the Catskills, the bottom clouds break and what
          looks to be the ground, solid, dark, becomes visible in patches
          between white nearly everywhere else, even beneath us, clouds
          clumped here and there,
white islands afloat on a earth-dark sea,
 
or winter lakes, frozen, with fish sluggish or asleep, and where a black dot
          is an angry man who sits on ice pretending to fish.
 
Yes,
we know about such men—
 
fathers crazed from war, brothers full of beer, uncles half deaf and still
          vibrating from riding Harleys on interstates, those months of miles
          that jarred the fillings in teeth, that rattled the under-pinnings of
          sanity.
Not to mention the hemorrhoids (a little toilet humor always makes
the Rotarians laugh)…
Or, the husbands-boyfriends-incestuous brothers of too-eager-to-please
          women and girls who remember the men in their lives saying to
          the TV
          —Look at the bazooms on her
          —I known what she needs
          —How come all these actresses are sluts and whores
until every girl is what is seen and heard and felt until even the bruises
          become (as that beautifully mad woman poet near Boston said)
          “Blue Roses”
and for a moment the feeling a bit shallow, a bit of nausea, just as
when the body is about to give up, but not the ghost (in case that is what
          you were expecting to read), not yet anyway.
But the moment is singular, the descent beckons, inertia is messed
with, the throttle backed off, the RPM s quickly falling,
the body so loving stasis that it wants, momentarily, to retch with any
          change, until a new stability is established at, in the pilot's
          professional voice:
 
          altitude thirty thousand.
 
So ten minutes more until reality is firm underfoot, and not carpet
glued to aluminum, fulfilling, hundreds of years delayed,
Leonardo's dream. (The seabirds over Genoa so gentle, drafting the wind,
          not a cloud in the eye. Ahh…)
Just minutes more, if all goes well, which is the expectation paid for,
Reality as baggage claim stapled to the ticket: coded digits
and letters as if the DNA of travel were decipherable.
After all, isn't the formula: speed divided by distance…
And, isn't Time always the Answer?
Or, at least, the Problem?
It doesn't matter; our credit cards have already processed the fee,
withdrawals and deposits completed in a couple of blinks.
 
But this flight never breached into the nothingness of thin blue air,
of ceilingless sky, of proximity to divinity, that beauty that
is cheaper and easier than Jesus or Zen.
Rise and sink is all
this flight is, a sort of reverse resurrections, rise and fall:
          like the stock market,
          like the hemlines of skirts,
          like morals in an age of deceit…
but listen, I've been staring at this blue engine cowl, not that there's
          anything wrong, no fire, no failure, no dream of paradise, and no
          mocking of Einstein's formula for a single stone planet, or the
          representative thereof, propelled through space—so there it is,
 

          (United two-niner-two, Bradley Tower, report outer marker, over)
 
this interlude, this momentary suspension of mortgage payments
as we fall, controlled
 

          (Roger)
 
declining through clouds reversing, layer upon layer of shadows bending
          in dimmed light, thought curving along its own axis—
 

          (Bradley, Two-niner-two is at outer marker)
 
It's not the same as ascent, this distortion in clouds, bent air,
          disappointment, even, until, suddenly, small words painted white
          on blue metal, come into focus,
 

          (United two-niner-two, Bradley Tower. Cleared to land runway 23.
          Wind 10 knots. Report wheels down)
 
words that seem magical, other-worldly, even,
 

          (Bradley, Two-niner-two has wheels down and locked)
 
words one could never use in conversation, or little else, other than,
          perhaps,
the title of a poem.