Air Lines

Joseph Zitt (1992?)

Here we juggle satchels randomly.
Here we at least appear to enter evenly
And, as we find our places, shift our packages
From overhead to by our weary feet.

Pretend, for now, that these people are your friends,
Or, if not your friends,
The people who might play your friends
In television movies of your life.

Here we now extinguish all smoking materials.
Here we strap ourselves within the howling tube of flight.
Here we observe the Ritual Dance
As the uniformed ones who would serve us dinner
And preserve our lives
Show us the uses of the implements
That might fall into our future
Should the pressure of air not be
What it is presumed to be
Or should our interrupted soaring
Deposit us upon the waters
On which our easily unfastened seat would let us float.

Here we achieve our union with the air.
Do not fear, though our seats rise up against us.
The ground retracting,
We let the skywinds work their will.

II

I wanted to write you poems in a forgotten language
But no lost tongues moderate the air
Between Houston and Newark
En route from Austin to New York
Save the long diffused smoke rings
Deployed by disenfranchised natives centuries ago
Waiting all this time to ensnare the invaders' craft
And bring to them the messages of other,
Now industrial planes.

Sample, now, this turbulence;
Play it back, when you get home,
at sixty times its captured speed and hear

The nightcry of a dancer
Possessed by and possessing souls of eagles
Who look up above their circles, above the clouds
And see the gleaming lighted bellies of the skywhales
That soar so much faster
Than their feathers would believe.

III

Let me get this straight.

We're in a can much heavier than air.
(Yeah)
And we're moving real real fast
(Uh-huh)
And the wings are shaped in mystic secret forms
That cause the air to shoot above and miss them
So the air below is pushing real hard
And keeps these heavy toys and people
Miles above the ground
(You got it)
And all these bumps and potholes that we feel
Are real real big but can't be seen
And everyone is used to it
And it's safer here than riding on the ground.
(Uh-huh)
Uh-huh.

I'll rather bet on fairy's wings than on --
What's the word? -- aerodynamics.
It makes more sense to me
Than heavy air pushing a metal box
Real fast above the Earth.

OK
(OK)
Uh-huh
(Now let me watch the movie, huh?)

IV

Against the slimness of her waist
I prayed to rest my head.
She, the crispness of whose clothes
Spoke of calm and continuity,
Could not hear my wish, but still,
As her passing gentleness
Unbrushed my dreamswept hair,
Granted all my whispers.
I returned, renewed,
To cabin night
And air-enlivened sleep.

V

Rock me gently now,
Mother of Flight,
As we slowly drop through clouds,
Through sifting air.
We surrender here to the pull of earth
And feel not heavier, but lighter.

The plastic arms, the fine webbed belts
That bind us to our cradling seats
Vibrate with the mantras
Of the priests of our technologies:

Relax:
Millions fly like you,
And, like you, they well fly again.

Relax:
The rushing that we hear
Is not the torturing of winds
But greetings.

Relax:
The Mother of Flight blesses us
And decants us gently on forgiving ground.

Remember the solaces of flight.

Remember:
Gravity
Is
Your
Friend.