“Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense.”
Wallace Stevens
Poetry of Travel, Poetry of Place
Writing helps us to process what we're learning and open ourselves to insight.
Reading aloud moves words through our bodies by way of our breath, vocal cords, ears, so to deepen a physical experience.
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
