Issue #1 Winter 2002
Air Travel
by Clarinda Harriss
I. Western Air Lane
O raucous crow, who will you call
when your children all have flown?
Night! Let the black that lights your feathers
guide my flying children home.
II.
Holding Pattern
An arriving passenger drops the Orlando Times
on a seat in Charlotte. A departing passenger
picks it up. On her way to O’Hare turning
to the Family Pages, she (startled) releases to the windy city
six cut-out newsprint stars the size of a child’s hand.
Will this be the flight that claims me as baggage?
A plane crosses a whole continent with pilot and passengers
frozen dead. Another plane flies around in circles
because it’s snowing somewhere. Another plane bobs
through a sky that’s sunlit and thunderclouded
like bad religious art. The one still thing
is a solemn child coloring with a blue crayon.
Black Holes hold flying crayons of all colors.
Me, I’m stuck in a holding pattern over Philadelphia.
I’d rather be in Baltimore but I can lie back on
any rough-trade wind that tries to smack me around
and laugh. So the Summer of Nothing’s coming,
two-oh-oh-oh, triple nothing, thirty-some years after
the Summer of Love. Still love’s in the air. I can
feel it flying around like
sweat off a dancer.
The wind’s swept my place clear and clean.
Degas was wrong. His gallopers arc through air
with all four hooves flung to all four winds.
Freeze frames came along and explained
a horse is air-borne only when all four hooves
bunch under him. Almost as if he’s kneeling.
Kneeling on tough nothing.
III. Mirror
In line at the coffin-size head
I see a girl
watching me fix my lipstick.
I watch her
watch me in a corner of my little
powdery mirror.
She’s the age when I used to
think
“As if anybody looks at them.”
Still, she’s ever
ever so slightly moving her lips
in sync.
IV.
Things Crash,
Things
Fly
Gosonne, Jul. 26: Waiting to die while the flaming plane crashes, a passenger sees framed in his window a landscape that reminds him of a painting. There are bright hilly fields, a steep roof and a tiny animal. In a second he can see it’s a horse, and in an another second that the horse is pulling a plow with a tiny man guiding them. A plow! It’s France in the year 2000. The passenger thinks the painting is by either Millet or Van Gogh. This is something that could be checked out on the Internet sometime. He wants to jot down a note. He feels intensely irritated that he has no pen or pad. As the window blackens with smoke and oil, he thinks: So this is the crap people think about when they’re about to die.
This is the passenger the people who sifted through the wreckage kept talking about on television. They thought he must have seen Jesus. There was something like a smile on his ruined face.
*
“Les Glaneuses,” 1857
“Noon: Rest from Work (After Millet)” 1889-90, Musee d’Orsay, Paris
October 1889, “Landscape
with House and Ploughman”; Oil on canvas; The Hermitage, St.
Petersburg, No. 3KP 562. Formerly
collection Otto Krebs, Holzdorf.
As
far as I can tell from the catalog, this work has never been previously
exhibited
–Mark Harden
*
Surfing the early morning TV
channels from her bed a woman sees a scene that reminds her of Millet’s “The
Gleaners.” People in dark, bulky
clothes stoop to pick through a flame-yellow field under a gentian sky. The
Concorde has just crashed and burned there. The woman rushes to her computer naked to check out the scene. It’s Millet’s “The Gleaners,” all right, but the
colors on the TV screen were Van Gogh colors. She types in “Van Gogh
With Pictures.” She finds
thumbnails of many Van Gogh studies of Millet, but none of “The Gleaners.” She wonders if she only imagined those colors, or if it was a different
Van Gogh picture, maybe “Rest from Work.” She clicks on that one.
The thickly sleeping boy and girl are too whole and the haystack too
unblown to be what the wreck-pickers saw. The last thumbnail, a picture she doesn’t recall ever seeing before,
is titled “Landscape with Ploughman.”
There are bright hilly fields, a steep roof, and a tiny animal. A closer look reveals that it’s a horse pulling a
plow, with a tiny man guiding them.
This program has
performed an illegal inactivity and will be shut down.
V. (January, 2000)
Below British Airways’ white sky-writing
the veils of Edinburgh (purple, salmon, gold-bordered)
flutter at Indian ankles or (black and thick) suck into
the mouths of Persian girls gasping to stay ground-bound
as they labor up Princes Street against grinding gusts.
The whole blue-glass globe rattles with flying things
thick as snow motes in a paperweight.
Burlington, say, in January,
a commuter plane lumbers up air-current stairs
bumping its dull bulk along like roll-on luggage, then
suddenly sleek
needles through folds of cold over
corduroy mountains patched with white satin
fringed by wind-brown evergreens and
lovebeaded with strings of skiers.
In nearby Middlebury in a barn like a castle
for three full minutes a horse doctor folds up and holds
the left front leg of Morgan mare. Is it sound?
She’s black as a cold night with one star.
He releases the hoof. She trots away without favoring
the leg. A rich couple from Oregon decides to buy her.
How will she get there from
Vermont? She’ll fly.
VI. Flying Over Tiny Ponds and Mountains,
notice how
clouds waver like smoke from something burning
some pyre or bonfire
built on a grander scale than the baby landscape–
a stove maybe
for larger dolls than the tiny people
in the plane.
Ponder scale,
how ant stale’s less shit-like than cow dung,
and smeared
on a windshield a bug’s less disgusting than a bird.
How hard it is
to see a soul in one month’s bloody conceptus
swirling down. . .
And how we admire
big hands doing tiny things, lasering veins or
fastening pearls
among the tiny damp hairs at a slender nape.
Playing sixteenth notes
on a piccolo, flute or violin. Simply not breaking
the dolls’ tiny teacups.
Consider perspective,
how potent its hocus-pocus, how even if
we were together
rather than fifty thousand vertical feet apart
each of us, love
by squinting one eye and holding up one thumb
could make the other
disappear.
VII.
Poetry Is What Fish Won’t Eat
“The Irish memorized poetry before a voyage. In case of shipwreck, poetry in their bellies would keep fish from devouring them.”—Esiaba Irobi, September, 2001.
Poetry has become useful again. It
Is front page news. We do
What we can to explain a world where soon
Fish and loaves—always far too few—
Won’t feed new multitudes doomed to
Eat bitterness morning, noon and night.
Eating in cities becomes rest & recreation.
Fish, raw, gorgeously slivered; black beef;
Poetry-crafted salads; fine Chateau-Neuf
Won’t keep our minds off terror or grief,
Is, nevertheless, a distraction from the question
“What could we have done?”
What would have kept the death-planes hanging
Fishlike in their clear blue tanks of sky
Eating the miles between space and time?
Won’t some big voice say what in the bloody world
Is the prayer, spell, rhyme
Poetry we should be chanting?
Poetry is what the fish won’t eat.
Is what the ancient Irish learned by heart,
What they carried in their stomachs.
Fish flashing silver behind the eyes of the starved
Won’t fill like potatoes or good brown brack.
Eat for another hunger. Take. This is my Body. Eat.
©2001 Clarinda Harriss
Clarinda Harriss chairs the English Department at Towson University, near Baltimore, where she teaches poetry and prosody. Her most recent poetry collection is License Renewal For The Blind (Cooper House). One of her main research interests is prison writers, with whom she has worked for decades. Some of her children and grandchildren live fairly far away; that's why she does a lot of air travel.