“Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense.”
Wallace Stevens
Poetry of Travel, Poetry of Place
Flight
I wince. In reflex, my left hand shields my eyes
against wing snap, against the urge to stop
for a flock on the highway, muttering recollections…
parents launched by a car that filled the rearview
mirror. The news of their departure from this life
soon feathered from summer radios on the half hour.
This tinted windshield raises invisible eddies.
A flight of pigeons spreads skyward with red feet.
Again birds will cluster on roadsides, settle in eaves.
Were I a latter-day Pandora unlocking and releasing
Misfortunes' rush from a sprung box of myth, I'd note
they turn to feed on us, not on insect, fruit, seed.
Hope beguiles us yet again to open lids. What’s inside
may be a gift—another heart to hold up to all ills—
or a crush greater than any other, the cries as bodies
shatter safety glass, and, after....You’ve heard
Hope’s whisper, its lift releasing secrets.
Here escape's a blur upward, and surrounds us
as we speak. Wing-fanned, we race against what is
unavoidable, like wind, or shadow, or the next tick
of the blood’s clock, as though luck itself had wings.
first published in The Examined Life Journal
