| No idyll’s reached without the gravest difficulty. |
The Boeing dreams its boarding passengers
which are poured, like poison, through its weeping ear.
Jet mushrooms spore their speed in troposphere,
staining the skies above the glacier
where evening’s amber and the sea wind blurs
the iceberg galaxies. A drinker stirs
her cocktail and gulps down her time.
Nothing she sees around her can redeem
the tawdry earrings of her whiskey tears,
for she is addicted to the ‘over there’,
flies blind through high cathedrals
while, below, a city’s bar chart reappears:
a human experiment in scrapers’ stairs,
temples, ziggurats. Results Not Known.
She has drunk the compass, but its north swings home
and the bride in her veil of Ativan
grows lovelier as the ground draws near
for she is contracted to vertiginous air,
that is, till the runway’s shattered shear
shall make her walk out the shining shards of here.