2

AIRPORT LETTER

In Greensboro the trees spasm with ache or what

I’ll say is ache. Better to pretend winter

never came with its hands full of Canada.

Better to watch them sway this always

farewell. Better to do many things than this.

One more book I won’t finish

and artesian water and muffins

like wagon wheels want my wallet

to open like a flower. Nobody laughs

when I say Kim Jong-Il is my co-pilot,

nobody but me, and in this

there is a lonesome perfection

found high above one’s life.

I am advised the cushion beneath me will float

should we find ourselves in water

and I’m informed of the invention

of the seat belt. All its mysteries

tumble out into this tube of air

we’ll call our own and in it

the smell of being human goes forth—

it isn’t bad, not when

you’ve burned by mistake

a bag of dog hair,

as I did one summer that now feels

like amnesia. But this odor is communal,

countless cells pushing

salt from the skin like a greeting.

A congress of nerves.

So I think of you beside me,

your body knotted by colorless dreams.

How the sky can seem

an intrusion,

all this blue like an ocean, an ur-sea.

Something in which

to vanish. To sink like warm stones.