Flight, with Mountains

(in memory of David Herron)

1

Tarmac, take-off: metallic words conduct us

over that substance, black with spilt rain,

to this event. Sealed, we turn and pause.

Engines churn and throb to a climax, then

up: a hard spurt, and the passionate rise

levels out for this gradual incline.

There was something of pleasure in that thrust

from earth into ignorant cloud; but here,

above all tremors of sensation, rest

replaces motion; secretly we enter

the obscurely gliding current, and encased

in vitreous calm inhabit the high air.

Now I see, beneath the plated wing,

cloud edges withdrawing their slow foam

from shoreline, rippling hills, and beyond, the long

crested range of the land’s height. I am

carried too far by this blind rocketing:

faced with mountains, I remember him

whose death seems a convention of such a view:

another one for the mountains. Another one

who, climbing to stain the high snow

with his shadow, fell, and briefly caught between

sudden earth and sun, projected below

a flicker of darkness; as, now, this plane.

2

Only air to hold the wings;

only words to hold the story;

only a frail web of cells

to hold heat in the body.

Breath bleeds from throat and lungs

under the last cold fury;

words wither; meaning fails;

steel wings grow heavy.

3

Headlines announced it, over a double column of type:

the cabled facts, public regret, and a classified list

of your attainments – degrees, scholarships and positions,

and notable feats of climbing. So the record stands:

no place there for my private annotations. The face

that smiles in some doubt from a fuscous half-tone block

stirs me hardly more than those I have mistaken

daily, about the streets, for yours.

                                                      I can refer

to my own pictures; and turning first to the easiest,

least painful, I see Dave the raconteur,

playing a shoal of listeners on a casual line

of dry narration. Other images unreel:

your face in a car, silent, watching the dark road,

or animated and sunburnt from your hard pleasures

of snow and rock-face; again, I see you arguing,

practical and determined, as you draw with awkward puffs

at a rare cigarette.

                              So much, in vivid sequence

memory gives. And then, before I can turn away,

imagination adds the last scene: your eyes bruised,

mouth choked under a murderous weight of snow.

4

‘When you reach the top of a mountain, keep on climbing’ –

meaning, we may suppose,

to sketch on space the cool arabesques of birds

in plastic air, or those

exfoliating arcs, upward and outward,

of an aeronautic show.

Easier, such a free fall in reverse,

higher than clogging snow

or clutching gravity, than the awkward local

embrace of rocks. And observe

the planets coursing their elliptical race-tracks,

where each completed curve

cinctures a new dimension. Mark these patterns.

Mark, too, how the high

air thins. The top of any mountain

is a base for the sky.

5

Further by days and oceans than all my flying

you have gone, while here the air insensibly flowing

over a map of mountains drowns my dumbness.

A turn of the earth away, where a crawling dimness

waits now to absorb our light, another

snowscape, named like this one, took you; and neither

rope, nor crumbling ice, nor your unbelieving

uncommitted hands could hold you to living.

Wheels turn; the dissolving air rolls over

an arc of thunder. Gone is gone forever.