Oh no!

the plane is so small the baggage

is stuffed into its nose

and under its wings,

like the sacs of a honeybee!

There are six of us, mostly women.

We crowd in crouching

in our summer denims and shades,

settle, buckle, inhale. Oh

no, we are aloft! like that,

with just a buzz, and Shelter Island

flattens under us, between

the forks of Long Island—the twisty

legs of a dancing man, foreshortened,

his head lost in tan mist.

The plane is too little!

It rides the waves of air

like a rowboat, of aluminum,

slewing, dropping into the troughs,

giving out with a shuddering frug motion

of its shoulders—one, two!

I sit facing

the ladies I am flying to Boston with,

only one of them my wife

but all of them grimacing,

shutting their eyes with a sigh, resting

forehead on fingertips as in sick prayer.

Eyeballs roll, breasts bounce,

nostril-wings turn pale, and hair

comes sweaty undone, untended.

We tip! tip as a body,

skid above some transmitting antennae

in Rhode Island it must be,

stuck in the Earth like knitting needles

into a ball of yarn; webbed

by wire stays their eerie points rise.

We are high, but not so high

as not to feel high;

the Earth is too clear beneath us,

under glass that must not be touched,

each highway and house and the sites

of our graves but not yet,

not yet, No! Bright wind

toys with us,

tosses us,

our eyes all meet together

in one gel gaze of fear;

we are closer than in coitus;

the girl beside me,

young and Jewish, murmurs

she was only trying to get to Maine.

And now Boston

is its own blue streetmap beneath us;

we can feel in the lurch the pilot

trying to pull in Logan

like a great fish

by the throat of the runway.

What invisible castles

of turbulence rise

from the complacent, safe towers!

What ripples of ecstasy

leap

from the wind-whitened water!

The seawall, the side-streaming asphalt;

we are down, shouting out

defiance to our own momentum,

and trundle unbroken

back through the static gates

of life, and halt.

Had that been us, aloft?

Unbuckling, we trade

simpers and caresses of wry glance

in farewell, our terror

still moist on our clothes.

One by one

we crouch toward the open and drop,

dishevelled seatbelts left behind

us like an afterbirth.