After our short flight together,

we boarded separate planes

and flew to opposite ends of the country.

The first flight was rough,

you held me and later,

alone on the longer one, I recalled

the perfect gravity of your embrace,

stopped being afraid and fell asleep,

my dream blooming backwards into

the gentle silk engine of a chute.

Now, afterwards, I fell like I’m moving

obedient to some physical law people

believe in, but can never describe,

like the principle of air flowing under

the wings of a plane, allowing it to rise.

You sat beside me, holding me

to a perfect understanding of myself,

the way sign-language understates thought,

rediscovering it in the body.

Here, in another country, your thought still

holds me. Upstairs, a woman plays the flute—

her music a second ahead of any image of

falling water or sunlight dividing on the stone floor.

Downstairs, her children fish with their hands

for a seahorse swaying in the one shaft of light

in the dark aquarium. The curling nerve of his spine 

is a question they can’t answer—he floats

above their closing fists into a cloud.

In that cloud, you turn, you say my name to me:

while the plane banks, as the tower dictates.

It has something to do with the power of loss,

how it opposes itself at the last moment.

It has to do with how the plane, lifting off

from this world reluctantly, reappears above it,

effortless in flight. It has to do with how

your lips felt smiling against my ear, how

you held me as we fell, how falling together

our lives seemed the only constant objects in the sky,

how impossible it seemed that thin air

would ever begin to displace us.