Aerial Views.(Poem) - Prairie Schooner

 Aerial Views  'How bright are all things here!'  --Thomas Traherne     1.     Your smile has burnished this night for me.    Fumbling with carry-on and brief case,    my turn comes to pass you,    composed at the plane's exit    where you wish us, leaving,    a good and pleasant evening.    This flight has carried me    across bright things so far    from my mind for many years,    and I am grateful-my    words whispered at your ear    bring back the lost daylight    of your smile like the final    ember of the sun departing with a flare.    More beautiful, truly, than any I've seen.     2.     I saw once, very late, a July moon    smiling so low over the curve    of a golf course, where she and I lay.    It hung like tigereye, as if waiting    to be flattered and kissed    before settling behind the slender neck    of the palm arched above us.    Seventeen, our backs itched    from soft pins of Bermuda grass,    barely a breeze raised    her nipples to my touch.    Yet I shook, shook    as if fevered and dying on a ship    and she feared reaching shore.     3.     With the draw-back of tide,    fiddler crabs pop up from foamy holes.    Kids on bikes crush them for sport    beneath their knobby tires.    They throw Frisbees into the receptive breeze    and chase the errant flights.    Not stopping to coat their bodies in lotion,    they do not yield to the penetrating brightness.    All day it goes, a fact of earth and play,    until the fevered sky shakes,    the umbrellas fold,    the gulls pity themselves.     4.     We knew her before she was born,    her name a pearl of prophesy    somewhere dreamed before we were born.    We whisper to her rolling like a soft wave    beneath our warm hands upon your belly    in the middle of the night.    At first, we thought there were two of her,    one from each of our golden dreams,    that they would pass through    the gateway of mercy and peace,    holding hands, we half    expected. The oracle of ultrasound    lit an outline where one daughter could be    noted, it seemed to us, from an aerial view,    such an unsurveyed parcel    bordered by a beautiful confusion    of trees, fields, and rivers.     5.     The plane has been set    on a level course, the cabin lights    extinguished; a prayer of silence    spreads into the choral hum of jets    speeding toward stillness ...    A few reading lights come up    like street lamps ahead down    a highway. Only here do I keep    hours so close to someone I expect    never again to lay eye on,    brushing arms, avoiding a meeting of eyes.    I reach above, twist the nozzle    that shoots down a current of air,    then channel into my cell a cone of light    that floods the pages of my book.    I devote attention to words as a monk to beads.     Rubbing between my fingers the corner    of a page, I turn    to whatever imprinted image comes next:    a defiant cloudburst, or rout of demons,    descent into an extinct volcano, or never-to-be-reached    waveless ocean.        'Something to drink?     Sir, something to drink?'         Oh, why not?    Reaching across, sorry,    for some mineral water--         beautiful, more than any,    is her smile from eternity,    where, it is obvious, the day never    ends, nor horizon, nor young love,    play by the sea, receiving a child,    nor Why not? nor Why?     Why anything of beauty should be    is unanswerable from the earth.    In the sky, it seems as simple as a smile.    I press and light the figure of a stick man    holding a cup, wanting water,    and bring my thirst back.    She will return with kindness    in the dark, remain with us all    who must be returned to the earth.