THE SKY BEYOND THE CLOUDS
for Jenica Pembroke

 

Jenica said she’d never been on a plane and it broke my heart

I wanted to try and give her the pictures piece by piece

watching out the porthole window as the ground fades away

into a blue-green marble backdrop of our planet’s body

the illuminated curve, the clouds drifting beneath you

like standing on the bow of a steamer ship as the mists waft off the water

 

then the sun sets and beneath the clouds

all the wondrous caverns of treasure open to us

the winding lighted streets and houses

transformed into the richest undug mine

brimming with gold, with silver, with diamonds

sparkling beneath the metal wings of our impossible bird

 

no I was never scared, not even in turbulence

saner men than I have risked their mortality for beauty

cheating time the only high-minded dream of modern machinery

the abstraction of our entire world a simple accident

in the idiom of turning a bug into a feature

a picture’s worth eight hundred twenty-two more words than this