Flying

She was fooling around with the plane’s door handle. I said “Don’t touch that, sweetheart, you never know what can happen.” Suddenly the door disappeared and she flew out and I yelled “Judith” and saw her looking terrified at me as she was being carried away. I jumped out after her, smiled and held out my arms like wings and yelled “Fly like a bird, my darling, try flying like a bird.” She put out her arms, started flying like me and smiled. I flew nearer to her and when she was close enough I pulled her to my body and said “It’s not so bad flying like this, is it? It’s fun. You hold out one arm and I’ll hold out one of mine and we’ll see where we can get to.” She said “Daddy, you shouldn’t have gone after me, you know that,” and I said “I wouldn’t let you out here all alone. Don’t worry, we’ll be okay if we keep flying like this and, once we’re over land, get ourselves closer and closer to the ground.”

The plane by now couldn’t be seen. Others could, going different ways, but none seemed to alter their routes for us no matter how much waving I did. It was a clear day, blue sky, no clouds, the sun moving very fast. She said “What’s that?” pointing down and I said “Keep your arm up, we have to continue flying.” She said “I am, but what’s that?” and I said “Looks like a ship but it’s probably an illusion.” “What’s an illusion?” and I said “What a time for word lessons; save them for when we get home. For now just enjoy the flying and hope for no sudden air currents’ shifts.” My other arm held her tightly and I pressed my face into hers. We flew like that, cheek to cheek, our arms out but not moving. I was worried because I hadn’t yet come up with any idea to help us make a safe landing. How do we descend, how do we land smoothly or crash-land without breaking our legs? I’ll hold her legs up and just break mine if it has to come to that. She said “I love you, Daddy, I both like you and love you and always will. I’m never going to get married and move away from home.” I said “Oh well, one day you might, not that I’ll ever really want you to. And me too to you, sweetie, with all that love. I’m glad we’re together like this. A little secret though. For the quickest moment in the plane I thought I wouldn’t jump out after you, that something would hold me back. Now nothing could make me happier than what I did.”

We left the ocean and we were over cliffs and then the wind shifted and we were being carried north along the coast. We’d been up at almost the same distance from water and land for a long time and I still had no idea how to get down. Then along the coastal road I saw my wife driving our car. Daniel was in the front seat, his hand sticking out the window to feel the breeze. The plane must have reported in about the two people sucked out of the plane, and when Sylvia heard about it she immediately got in the car and started looking for us, thinking I’d be able to take care of things in the air and that the wind would carry us east.

“Look at them, sweetheart, Mommy and Daniel. He should stick his arm in; what he’s doing is dangerous.” She said “There aren’t any other cars around, so it can’t hurt him.” “But it should be a rule he always observes, just in case he forgets and sticks it out on a crowded highway. And a car could suddenly come the other way. People drive like maniacs on these deserted roads and if one got too close to him his arm could be torn off.” “But the car would be going the other way — wouldn’t it? — so on Mommy’s side, not his,” and I said “Well, the driver of another car going their way could suddenly lose his head and try and pass on the right and get too close to Daniel’s arm — Daniel,” I screamed, “put your arm back right now. This is Daddy talking.” His arm went back in. Sylvia stopped the car, got out and looked up and yelled “So there you are. Come back now, my darlings; you’ll get yourselves killed.” “Look at her worrying about us, Judith — that’s nice, right? — Don’t worry, Sylvia,” I screamed, “we’re doing just fine, flying. There’s no feeling like it in the world, we’re both quite safe, and once I figure out a way to get us down, we will. If we have to crash-land doing it, don’t worry about Judith — I’ll hold her up and take the whole brunt of it myself. But I think it’s going to be some distance from here, inland or on the coast, so you just go home now and maybe we’ll see you in time for dinner. But you’ll never be able to keep up with us the way this wind’s blowing, and I don’t know how to make us go slower.” “You sure you’ll be all right?” she yelled, and I said “I can hardly hear you anymore, but yes, I think I got everything under control.”

We flew on, I held her in my arm, kissed her head repeatedly, thinking if anything would stop her from worrying, that would. “You sure there’s nothing to worry about, Daddy? I mean about what you said to Mommy,” and I said “What are you doing, reading my mind? Yes, everything’s okay, I’m positive.” We continued flying, each with an arm out, and by the time night came we were still no closer to or farther away from the ground.

- Stephen Dixon

Lucky Life

Lucky Life isn't one long string of horrors
and there are moments of peace and of pleasure as I lie in between the blows.
Lucky I don't have to wake up in Philipsburg, New Jersey,
on the hill overlooking Union Square or the hill overlooking
Kuebler Brewery or the hill overlooking S.S. Philip and James
but have my own hills and my own vistas to come back to.

Each year I go down to the island I add
one more year to the darkness;
and though I sit up with dear friends
trying to separate one year from the other,
this one from the last, that one from the former,
another from another,
after a while they all get lumped together,
the year we walked to Holgate,
the year our shoes got washed away,
the year it rained,
the year my tooth brought misery to us all.

This year was a crisis. I knew it when we pulled
the car onto the sand and looked for the key.
I knew it when we walked up the outside steps
and opened the hot icebox and began the struggle
with swollen drawers and I knew it when we laid out
the sheets and separated the clothes into piles
and I knew it when we made our first rush onto
the beach and I knew it when we finally sat
on the porch with coffee cups shaking in our hands.

My dream is I'm walking through Phillipsburg, New Jersey,
and I'm lost on South Main Street. I am trying to tell,
by memory, which statue of Christopher Columbus
I have to look for, the one with him slumped over
and lost in weariness or the one with him
vaguely guiding the way with a cross and a globe in
one hand and a compass in the other.
My dream is I'm in the Eagle Hotel on Chamber Street
sitting at the oak bar, listening to two
obese veterans discussing Hawaii in 1942,
and reading the funny signs over the bottles.
My dream is I sleep upstairs over the honey locust
and sit on the side porch overlooking the stone culvert
with a whole new set of friends, mostly old and humorless.

Dear waves, what will you do for me this year?
Will you drown out my scream?
Will you let me rise through the fog?
Will you fill me with that old salt feeling?
Will you let me take my long steps in the cold sand?
Will you let me lie on the white bedspread and study
the black clouds with the blue holes in them?
Will you let me see the rusty trees and the old monoplanes one more year?
Will you still let me draw my sacred figures
and move the kites and the birds around with my dark mind?

Lucky life is like this. Lucky there is an ocean to come to.
Lucky you can judge yourself in this water.
Lucky the waves are cold enough to wash out the meanness.
Lucky you can be purified over and over again.
Lucky there is the same cleanliness for everyone.
Lucky life is like that. Lucky life. Oh lucky life.
Oh lucky lucky life. Lucky life.

- Gerald Stern

Wheeling Motel

The vast waters flow past its backyard.
You can purchase a six- pack in bars!
Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee

a block down. It’s twenty- five years ago:
you went to death, I to life, and
which was luckier God only knows.

There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours.
The river is like that,
a blind familiar.

The wind will die down when I say so;
the leaden and lessening light on
the current.

Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.

- Franz Wright

Skeptic

It happened anyway
as engineers played bridge
and Noah hit the fridge
and gave his dog away.

Me, I was on the freeway,
ice in my glass. I knew
what a trumped-up sun could do.
It happened anyway.

- Peter Kline

Heirloom

A trembling between the windows in the kitchen we called ours, in which
we placed the plates carefully. We said the plates could stay in our house.

We spoke with our tongues, which touched at night. The only matter
was what had we had with own eyes seen. Seen: peppers at market,

thin scar usually hidden by clothing, downstairs neighbor moving in.
Seen: loving another person so much that you also love every single

other thing you touch. The dishes shook like leaves, floated downriver.
Days too. Washing clothes in the kitchen. Underwear in the laundry

like a bell in the head. The bed which creaked like a sleigh in snow, and
the small piano, and the quiet dying of blood, and the unbroken plates.

Tomato after green tomato from the farm up the street bloomed red
and did beat in time, and every day was the first and also the last, and.

In my hometown my friends were all wearing tuxedos to each other’s
weddings, licking icing from roses, a sweetness which sang the song

of their remembered bodies aging under all that formal cloth.
I don’t mean to sound perverse. It was beautiful if unnecessary.

- Lauren Clark

Swell

Mid-March, on the daily a.m. drop-off
through a bunch of affluent side streets
between school and here

a refrigerated dairy produce truck
keeps catching almond and dogwood branches,
so much that blossoms blizzard

the windscreen and moonroof
and I have to switch the wipers
to intermittent in its slipstream.

All I mean to say is that it was lovely,
that not every given is bleak or wrong
and some even are as gorgeous as they are elementary.

The kids come home on different buses
the same shade of egg yolk.
We call my mother from the shore for Easter.

That truck and blossoms story gets longer,
hokier, with each retelling. I’m not bothered.
April’s bright stretches, the mailman says, are swell.

Our local ‘Y’ widens its opening hours a smidgen.
The clay courts opposite pock and shuffle.
I learn to swim.

- Conor O’Callaghan

Admonitions to a Special Person

Watch out for power
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.

Watch out for hate,
it can open its mouth and you’ll fling yourself out
to eat off your leg, an instant leper. 

Watch out for friends,
because when you betray them,
as you will,
they will bury their heads in the toilet
and flush themselves away.

Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.

Watch out for games, the actor’s part,
the speech planned, known, given,
for it will give you away
and you will stand like a naked little boy,
pissing on your own child-bed.

Watch out for love,
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes,)
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won’t be heard
and none of your running will run.

Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can’t be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Special person,
if I were you I’d pay no attention
to admonitions from me,
made somewhat out of your words
and somewhat out of mine.
A collaboration.

I do not believe a word I have said,
except some, except I think of you like a young tree
with pasted on leaves and know you’ll root
and the real green thing will come.

Let go. Let go.
O special person,
possible leaves,
this typewriter likes you on the way to them,
but wants to break crystal glasses
in celebration,
for you,
when the dark crust is thrown off
and you float all around
like a happened balloon.

March 24, 1974

- Anne Sexton

Jet

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.

On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,
and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from, to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

- Tony Hoagland

Icarus Breathing

Indestructible seabirds, black and white, leading and following;

semivisible mist, undulating, worming about the head;

rain starring the sea, tearing all over me;

our little boat, as in a Hosukai print, nudging closer

to Icarus (a humpback whale, not a foolish dead boy)

heaving against rough water; a voluminous inward grinding--

like a self breathing, but not a self--revivifying,

oxygenating the blood, making the blowhole move,

like a mouth silent against the decrees of fate: joy, grief,

desperation, triumph. Only God can obstruct them.

A big wave makes my feet slither. I feel like a baby,

bodiless and strange: a man is nothing if he is not changing.

Father, is that you breathing? Forgiveness is anathema to me.

I apologize. Knock me to the floor. Take me with you.

- Henri Cole

"Picture the east Aegean sea by night;

And in an open bay before that sea
Upwards of 30,000 men
Asleep like spoons among their fatal ships.
Now look along the moonlit beach, and note
A naked man, face wet with tears,
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each other’s luminescent panes;
Then kneel among those panes, beggar his arms, and pray:

‘Out of humiliation, Source, I cry,
Source, hear my voice, and with your presence
Bless my supplication.’

The sea as quiet as light.
His voice flows on:
“


- Christopher Logue

"Let not your heart be troubled:

ye believe in God, believe also in me.

In my father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there may ye be also.

And whither I go ye know. And the way ye know.”

- John 14: 1-4

Elegy for a Boyhood Lover Slain in Battle

After Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest

The branches shake, Jimmy, it rains in that trance;
Tuxedo in the colonnades asks after your breakfast.
A fire rises and falls in the house of Cadmus,
light on your bare neck, your voice
almost washed out in memory's reel.

Rapt in that flood I heard the night away
through Ovid, through mauve firs thrashing.
Your voice like a bellrope dangles in sterile heat
amid these unspooled metaphors. Today
the dry sun annuls the slide into la terra trema, but
through sweet parallax I watch you, sixteen, climb
like Phaethon the too-large chariot, the pitcher's
mound in Griffiths Stadium. A fire
in the house of Cadmus, a fire, and hard rain
in that trance. Tuxedo in the scullery,
the nails of your thick fingers flash
in the night-light. Still as a deer I smell
you through the monogrammed cloth.
The milk on your breath tarries the years.

"Verbose and hard" the Times once wrote,
and even now I stiffen, but strangely,
as a battered word reforms, anagrammatic.
A fire rises and falls, another trance
but no rain any more, no mansion.
Only the newsprint-brittle bacchanals of the sea.
The sun depilates boughs and dries the cliffside
veins of sediment and clay. Your Hesperidian form
gone, still I imagine you poised on a cot
dark-faced over your mother's Leaves of Grass:
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse, dash me
with amorous wet, I can repay you, awake,
not noticing the roan morning or the locust calls
on Iwo Jima.

- Alex Halberstadt

"Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them,

this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not. They would be glad to reduce it. The first two would be glad to find a third.

In our own time Friendship arises in the same way. For us of course the shared activity and therefore the companionship on which Friendship supervenes will not often be a bodily one like hunting or fighting. It may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends. In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? - Or at least, "Do you care about the same truth?" The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance, can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.

Notice that Friendship thus repeats an a more individual and less socially necessary level the character of the Companionship which was its matrix. The Companionship was between people who were doing something together - hunting, studying, painting or what you will. The Friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared and less easily defined; still hunters, but of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating, but in some work the world does not, or not yet, take account of; still travelling companions, but on a different kind of journey. Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead.”

- C.S. Lewis, from ‘The Four Loves”

"Across the beach, the man with one leg had been joined by his young girlfriend,

a pale, blond woman with the usual number of limbs. She was helping him down to the water. Their movement, jerky and storklike, drew attention to itself, but I was looking because of something else. It was how . . . sexual they were together. I don’t know how else to put it, or what that means, exactly, except that they were playful with each other, as adults rarely are. Theirs was a performance of a sort. They had established clarity on the point, and such clarity can be important. It is, for instance, important to me at times, when I find myself at dinner with my mother, to announce loudly to the waiter, “This is my mother,” or an equivalent expression that makes our relationship unambiguous.

Celeste was still on her phone, so I walked to the water by myself. My thoughts had turned to the couple’s sex life. What was under the man’s bathing suit, and how had the woman responded when she first saw him naked—with aversion, or arousal, or something more mixed and subtle, a curiosity and an arousal that were inseparable from or somehow part of the shock or fear that we feel in the presence of difference? It was, of course, possible that the absence of his leg did not enter into it, and that, as we are taught to believe and no one, I think, believes fully, the matter of love transcends all superficial considerations. But who is to say what is superficial and what isn’t? No, more likely, I thought, entering the water and feeling the warm salt liquid envelop me, cooling nothing but seeming to focus the sun’s rays more penetratingly on my skin and eyes and lips, more likely the woman enjoyed the idea of herself as someone who chooses an unusual partner; or—for that was only one possibility—she understood that we are all incomplete versions of an unafraid self trying to be born, and that our apparent wholeness only blinds us to this more substantial insufficiency. If Celeste had been there with me, I would have remarked that this couple had taken up arms in the fight against death—not because an incomplete body represents death, but because normalcy represents death. Because every decision that conforms to expectations, that raises no eyebrows, prompts no outrage or whispering or gossip, that merely reprises the ambered templates forged as prisons by those who have come before—every action taken under this regime of fear is the prefatory enactment of death.

And Celeste would have said, “I see we’re back on your favorite subject.”

And I would have said, “I want to talk about death. And other big things, like life and the soul and tax policy. I want to tromp around in boots in the china shop, where you’ve laid crystal figurines on the ground and dressed the halls in lace that someone went blind to stitch.”

“You’ve made your position clear.”

“My position isn’t clear to me! ” I’d shout. “My position isn’t clear, because my position depends on you.”

“Then talk to me. And don’t speak for me in imaginary dialogues in your head.”

“But you’re not here,” I said, and watched her tumble into the blackness of my mind, spinning like a falling figure in an old movie.

There I go, speaking for everyone when I’m alone, naming all the animals and plants as though my words could turn them into something else.”

- from Greg Jackson’s story, “Poetry,” from The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/poetry

The Anactoria Poem 

Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers, 
others call a fleet the most beautiful of 
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it's what-
            ever you love best.

And it's easy to make this understood by 
everyone, for she who surpassed all human 
kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her
            husband—that best of

men—went sailing off to the shores of Troy and 
never spent a thought on her child or loving 
parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and
            left her to wander,

she forgot them all, she could not remember 
anything but longing, and lightly straying 
aside, lost her way. But that reminds me
            now: Anactória,

she's not here, and I'd rather see her lovely 
step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on
all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
            glittering armor.

   - Sappho