Kenneth C. Steven
Flight
In the beginning
The plane hums about the tarmac,
Its wings tipping and lifting, going nowhere.
The airport is a honeycomb of lights
And there is fog like wool over the city,
The city that is far away in the madness of its own rush hour.
The beautiful girl who smiles but does not really mean it,
Shows where the exits are and demonstrates
How useless a lifejacket would be in any real emergency.
Three-quarters of the fat men on business are blind
Behind their newspapers. I watch her
Not to know how to inflate my lifejacket
But because she is beautiful, and because now
Before the take-off I an afraid and I am thrilled,
And life goes fast through my veins
And everything is larger, stranger, brighter.
The plane stops. Like a beast it crouches
There at the end of the runway, then suddenly
Seems to rage into life, surges forward, now like a galloping
horse,
Now like a jaguar, now like no beast alive
But rather some mythical creature, and the airport, the city,
The rush hour, are swept away behind like a child’s toys,
And the plane lifts, conquers the air,
And there is that surge, that welling upwards
Like rising for air out of dark water,
And we swivel round and round and round
Into the sunset.
Page(s) 40
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