To a High Aircraft
(after William Cullen Bryant)
While now by slow degrees
the heat and light of a long summer day
decline, the west become a burning gallery
out of the evening news,
purposefully it climbs
past church tower, widow’s walk and finial,
past haggard crowns of trees, at an angle
so steep the vision seems
a far heroic thing,
tilting at heaven up the azure dome,
tangent to every memory of home,
vector of vanishing,
pale cursor, bead of ice
burnished by the late sun five miles high, where
it is unzippering the stratosphere
in a rumor of silence,
breasting the absolute gulf,
riding an arc of crumbling contrail as,
fading in the wake of its own progress,
does the aspiring self,
safe from the fanatic glance
that hates its brightness and would bring it to
the desert landscape of a failed state now
jeweled with scorched remains:
unslowed by any doubt,
ardent, guided by an Almagest
hour by hour, so night need bring no rest
during all the voyage out,
never less than alone,
until at last, by some isthmus or bay
where countless shore birds watch incuriously,
it touches earth again.
Palazzo Maldura
The palazzo library was a retrofit,
and as usual I was bookworming
through the metal stacks that morning,
the photocopier in the corner on its time out
where the frescoes had started to spall,
nymphs and satyrs scuffed by human traffic
as they danced to a sensual music.
But I ignored their pipe and timbrel,
intent on some offprint or quarto.
In the beginning you do not know yourself,
and then there follow years of
knowing only what you do not know,
and the hope (though you cannot presume)
that something of all you come upon
might find in you a local habitation.
I rounded a corner into the next room
and moved aside to let him pass,
another coming toward me
intent as I was, anxiety
and goodwill constant rivals in his face
through the long moment it took
to recognize him in the mirrored wall—
for there was no next room at all,
and I had met myself coming back.
